Legal, Compliance & HR Topics
Legal operations, HR management, M&A integration, and compliance. Includes legal workflows, talent management, and organizational transitions.
Understanding of Compensation Roles and Responsibilities
Checks that candidates understand the scope of work typically handled by compensation professionals and teams. Topics include market benchmarking salary analysis job leveling pay structure and grade design equity plan administration compensation policy development and supporting hiring and offer negotiations. It also covers operational responsibilities such as maintaining data integrity configuring systems generating reports and supporting audit readiness. Strong responses show awareness of how strategic compensation work and operational casework interact and how the role partners with human resources recruiting finance and business leaders.
Communicating Compensation Analysis and Findings
Explain how you translate complex compensation analysis, regulatory detail, or difficult findings into clear messages for different audiences. Cover audience segmentation and tailoring, story structure, use of visuals and dashboards to surface the right metrics, framing recommendations and trade offs, maintaining confidentiality and legal compliance, and preparing leaders for difficult conversations. Provide examples of executive briefs, manager guidance, and employee communications and how you measured comprehension and acceptance.
Data Reconciliation and Accuracy Auditing
Focuses on processes and controls used to assure compensation data accuracy across systems and through calculation pipelines. Topics include reconciling payroll, human resources and incentive systems; building automated reconciliation checks and exception reports; tracing discrepancies to source records; root cause analysis of recurring data issues; defining reconciliation cadence and owner responsibilities; designing sampling and audit strategies; and documenting controls and remediation steps to ensure accurate pay outcomes.
Compensation Trends in Tech
Assesses awareness of evolving market dynamics that influence pay programs in technology companies. Topics include the impact of remote and hybrid work on geographic pay differentials, trends in equity program design and refresh strategies, salary transparency movements, changing candidate preferences across generations, skill premium for scarce technical roles, and macroeconomic influences such as inflation on compensation budgets. Candidates should be able to discuss how these trends affect pay philosophy, benchmarking practice, and talent acquisition strategy.
Compensation Analytics and Tools
Covers the practical technical skills and analytical approaches used to generate rigorous compensation insights. Topics include extracting and transforming pay and population data with structured query language, building analyses and models in spreadsheet software, scripting with languages such as Python for data manipulation and visualization, and using compensation survey platforms and vendor data. Candidates should demonstrate cohort and progression analysis, use of window and aggregation functions, forecasting and payout modeling, sensitivity and scenario analysis, automation of repeatable processes, and practices for reproducible and auditable analysis. This topic also assesses familiarity with common compensation software and how to translate technical results into clear recommendations for stakeholders.
Equity Award Administration and Analysis
Covers the administration, design, valuation, and analytics of long term incentive and equity programs. Candidates should understand equity instruments such as stock options and restricted stock units, typical grant strategies and vesting schedules, modeling the long term value of awards under different scenarios, implications for accounting and dilution, tax and regulatory considerations, equitable distribution practices across employee populations, and how to measure and communicate the value and performance of equity programs.
Compensation Regulations and Legal Framework
Knowledge of the legal and regulatory environment that affects compensation program design and operations including wage and hour rules, equal pay and nondiscrimination laws, pay transparency requirements, tax and social security implications, stock plan and option rules, bonus and incentive regulations, employment classification, and cross border compliance considerations. Candidates should explain how regulations shape program design, documentation and audit practices, escalation to legal and finance partners, and methods to mitigate regulatory risk.
Variable Compensation and Incentive Design
Covers design, implementation, and evaluation of variable pay and incentive programs to align employee behavior with business goals. Topics include annual bonus programs, commission structures, equity awards, target pay mix, defining measurable performance metrics and thresholds, payout curves and accelerators, model driven cost and payout scenario analysis, governance, clawback and risk controls, and operational considerations for eligibility and payout timing. Candidates should demonstrate how they balance motivational impact, fairness, simplicity, and cost control.
Compensation Fundamentals and Terminology
Core concepts and vocabulary used in compensation work including market benchmarking and salary surveys pay bands and salary ranges percentile positioning such as median and upper quartile base pay variable pay and long term incentives job leveling market mapping internal equity concepts and the relationship between survey data and internal pay decisions. Candidates should be able to define these terms explain when to use particular approaches and describe implications for decision making.