At a glance
- In 2022, BARK chose another compensation tool over CompTool after one call.
- Benchmarking a job family there still meant pricing each role individually.
- They couldn’t upload their own survey data; it sat in the vendor’s queue for a week.
- CompTool worked with BARK to move them over quickly and within their budget.
The email
This is the email our founder, Justin Hampton, received from BARK’s compensation team.
Hi Justin, I never do this (I know, I know, people who say that have always done it- but legit, first time experience for me). I wanted to reach out and see if you had any thoughts on our situation at BARK. We’ve connected with your team and they did a PHENOMENAL job but wanted to reach out to chat personally and walk you through our self-made problem if you didn’t mind.
The long & short of it- pardon my french, but we messed up. In 2022 we went with the tool that shall not be named instead of CompTool based on one call and a ton of back and forth and it was just a huge mistake. There are things on their site that we were convinced were part of the software that aren’t and I just got off a pretty disappointing call with our rep there.
There’s a blurb on the site that mentions benchmarking job families in just a few clicks; we were pretty excited about it but when we asked her about it, she was excited to show us the *mind blowing* new functionality of…. filtering- so you can see your family but have to still benchmark each role. Individually. Not sure in what world 794 clicks constitutes a “few” but it’s not mine.
Additionally, we can’t upload our own survey data and they have to load it and link it to our geo markets. Which means we send them data we paid for to sit in a queue for a week. I’m sitting here confused wondering how we got stuck with tech from the early 2000’s if we signed in 2022. She mentioned that it was as automated as they could get it and I’m guessing we ourselves are the automation solutions at this point. …I’m extremely frustrated.
I’m being facetious (and granted, immature at this point) about this, I don’t want to disparage the software publicly because I’m sure it’s an improvement for some poor comp department still stuck in excel, but this is not the right solution for us. I was fully ready to just deal with it through 2025 and start anew with CompTool in 2026 but after sitting through that call I’m not sure I can wait it out any longer. I was planning on having an overlap of about 6 months for both tools but wanted to see if you thought we could do anything to get us on CompTool sooner without double hitting our budget.
So with all that said, other than “sucker!”, “told ya so!” and “pffffft, serves you right non-believer!” any thoughts on this situation from your end?
What happened next
After some discussions with the team, we were able to work with BARK to get them into the tool quickly and in their budget. We’d been in their shoes ourselves, so finding a way to make it work was easy.
What BARK gets with CompTool
- Whole job families in one pass: multi-match prices every job in a family, in multiple labor markets, instead of one role at a time.
- Your surveys, loaded fast: every survey you license is loaded at no extra cost, in under three days on average.