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Much Ado About Pay: A Four-Act Guide to Getting Compensation Back on Track 

If offers keep getting declined, managers earn barely more than the people they supervise and nobody can say for certain whether a salary is right, the problem isn’t your people. It’s a pay structure that drifted while everyone was busy.

Every Decision Made Sense. The Result Doesn’t.

Compensation used to be one of the most predictable parts of running a business.

Then the market moved, and everyone moved with it. Across-the-board increases to keep people from leaving. New titles when there was no budget for a raise. A number agreed to quickly because the role had been open for four months and the team was covering for it.

Every one of those decisions was defensible on its own.

Together, they pulled compensation quietly out of alignment, and the symptoms don’t show up until much later. A strong candidate turns down a good offer. A manager works out that they’re earning barely more than the people they supervise. A budget lands differently than anyone projected. Your best employee leaves for a number you would have matched, if anyone had asked.

Which leads to the question most organizations put off:

Is anyone here being paid the right amount?

This session will help you answer that with market data, clear job definitions and a structure you can actually defend.

What You’ll Learn

Julie Kniseley has spent 30 years helping organizations work out what they should be paying people — and untangling what happens when nobody checks for a while. She’ll walk through how compensation systems drift, how to catch the damage before it gets expensive and what it takes to build an approach that holds up.

This isn’t a session about paying people more. It’s about regaining control of a system that stopped reflecting your workforce or the market around it.

You'll leave knowing how to:

  • Spot compensation drift before it gets expensive
  • Use market data to make confident pay decisions
  • Write job descriptions that make market comparisons mean something
  • Find pay compression and equity risks hiding in your current structure
  • Build a compensation strategy that supports recruiting, retention and financial sustainability
  • Move from reactive pay decisions to a proactive strategy that supports recruiting, retention and your budget

If you’ve been making pay decisions one at a time and hoping they add up, or you suspect they haven’t, this session will show you how to find out and what to do about it.

Meet Your Host

Julie has spent three decades inside compensation questions — in start-ups, established organizations, nonprofits, government entities, medical practices and construction companies. She has seen how pay structures come apart, and she is direct about what it takes to put them back together.

Julie Kniseley-Web_BG_600x800_2025

 

Julie Kniseley, SHRM-SCP
President, HR Solutions
James Moore

Julie leads James Moore HR Solutions, where she helps organizations build equitable total rewards strategies grounded in real market data. She partners with leaders across industries to solve workforce challenges with practical, proven approaches. A frequent speaker on compensation and workforce strategy, Julie is at her best helping leaders connect people decisions to where the business is headed.

Why James Moore

Compensation questions rarely arrive on their own. They come attached to a hiring problem, a retention problem, a budget conversation or a board that wants to know the numbers are defensible.

Our HR Solutions team works with organizations that don’t have a dedicated compensation function or may not have a dedicated HR department either. We know what it’s like to make these decisions without a benchmark to check them against.

Our team helps organizations like yours:

  • Compare roles against industry-specific, geography-adjusted market data instead of broad national averages
  • Examine pay patterns across roles, levels and tenure to find inconsistencies before employees do
  • Build formal pay structures with defined job levels and bands that hold up under questioning
  • Review total compensation including base pay, benefits, retirement contributions and bonuses together
  • Turn all of it into a clear report you can take to leadership or a board

Learn more about compensation study services at James Moore.

 

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