Manual salary decisions under time pressure produce inconsistency and create compliance exposure — especially when the logic isn't documented. I built a nine-step tool that walks through geographic multipliers, experience validation, and compa-ratio anchoring before generating an approval-ready recommendation with a full audit trail. The candidate is referred to as "Finalist A" throughout, and the output includes two formatted approval emails ready to send.
Salary recommendations are high-stakes decisions made under process pressure.
When a finalist is selected, the clock starts. The People and Talent team has to calculate relevant experience correctly, apply geographic adjustments, assign the right anchor, benchmark against existing staff, and produce approval documentation — all consistently, all compliantly, all quickly.
Any one of those steps done incorrectly creates downstream problems: inequitable offers, failed audits, or approvals that have to be walked back. The risk is the process itself — too many variables, too little structure, and documentation that often exists only in someone's email or memory.
A step-by-step assistant that governs every variable in the process.
The Salary Generation Assistant guides a People and Talent team member through every decision point in the salary recommendation process. It starts with finalist confirmation and ends with two ready-to-send approval emails — one for the Head of Talent and COO, one for the hiring manager.
Every step references the FY26 Salary Bands and Salary Generation SOP. Geographic multipliers, experience rounding, anchor assignment, surplus logic, and benchmarking are all handled within the tool, with no step left to individual interpretation.
The output is a documented, defensible recommendation with a clear audit trail behind every placement decision.
Nine steps. One governed workflow. Approval-ready at the end.
The assistant is linear and gated — each step must be completed before the next begins. Privacy is enforced throughout: the candidate is referred to only as Finalist A.
Documentation that speaks for itself in an approval review.
The final output covers every variable an approver needs to evaluate the recommendation — role context, experience calculation, anchor movement, geographic adjustment, benchmarking, and comp ratio.
AI enforces the process. The team member owns the decision.
The assistant applies salary policy consistently across every hire. Every calculation, every label, every anchor assignment traces back to the FY26 Salary Bands and the Salary Generation SOP. AI ensures the right questions are asked in the right order with nothing skipped.
Process consistency
Every salary recommendation follows the same nine-step sequence. No shortcuts, no skipped steps, no variation based on who's running the process that day.
Experience audit trail
Each role is documented with a relevance determination and justification. Every step of the calculation is visible and tied to documented criteria, producing a final number with a clear paper trail.
Privacy by design
Candidate names and identifiers are excluded from the start. The tool reinforces this at every input step — Finalist A is the only reference used throughout.
Approval-ready formatting
The output is a formatted recommendation and two email templates, ready to send without additional editing.
Where the tool draws the line.
The following constraints are built into the process and enforced at every step.
Compensation decisions compound. Getting them right from the start matters.
An underdocumented salary offer creates problems long after the hire. Equity reviews surface inconsistencies. Audits expose missing rationale. Employees compare notes. The cost of a poorly documented placement decision carries forward — into performance conversations, equity reviews, and the employee's understanding of their own standing.
The Salary Generation Assistant exists to make the right process the easy process. When every recommendation is generated the same way, against the same framework, with the same documentation standard, the organization builds a compensation record it can defend — and a team that trusts the system behind it.