The consultancies are selling you a benchmark. You need a decision.
A published band tells you where the market was six months ago. Sachith Rai on why the big firms stop exactly where the useful part begins.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
The argument
- A published salary band tells you where the market was, not where it is — by the time it prints, the number has already moved.
- The big firms stop at the benchmark because the benchmark is defensible and safe; the decision it implies is where the risk, and the value, live.
- What a BFSI GCC needs isn’t the 50th percentile. It’s an answer to ‘what should we pay this person, this quarter, to win them’ — and that’s a different product.
A benchmark is a rear-view mirror sold as a windshield.
The compensation report on your desk was built from data gathered months before it published, cleaned, aggregated, and smoothed into a percentile band. For a slow-moving function that’s fine. For a BFSI centre hiring a scarce risk-and-quant leader in a market that reprices every quarter, it’s a snapshot of a market that no longer exists. You’re negotiating against today’s scarcity with yesterday’s average.
Worse, the band flattens exactly the signal you needed. It tells you the middle of a distribution when your problem is the tail — the three people who can actually do the job, and what it will take to move one of them. A percentile can’t see the tail. It was engineered to hide it.
“The consultancies stop at the benchmark because the benchmark is where the liability ends. A number that just describes the market can’t be wrong. A number that tells you what to do can be — so they never give you that one.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
The useful part begins where the report ends.
‘The 75th percentile for this role is X’ is not a decision. The decision is: given who we’re chasing, who else is chasing them, what their current package actually vests to, and how badly we need this seat filled this quarter — what do we put on the table? That answer doesn’t live in a published band. It lives in live placement data, in what offers are actually closing right now, in knowing the specific person’s specific alternatives.
That’s the line the big firms won’t cross, and it’s deliberate. Handing you a decision means owning the outcome. A benchmark is unfalsifiable; advice is accountable. So you’re sold the safe half and left to improvise the half that mattered — usually at the moment you can least afford to guess.
Ask for the decision, or you’re buying a description.
The test for whether comp intelligence is worth paying for is simple: does it change what you do on Monday? A report that tells you the band and stops has told you something true and left you exactly where you started. Intelligence that’s worth the money names the number for this hire, in this market, this quarter — and stands behind it.
We’d rather be the firm that says ‘pay this, here’s why, here’s what we’re seeing close’ and be held to it, than the one that hands you a distribution and calls the guessing your job. The band is the input. The decision is the product. Stop paying for the input as though it were the answer.
One pattern worth knowing, every week.
The Signal is our weekly read on the senior GCC talent market — one chart, one pattern, no noise. Written from live placement data.
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