The Science of Hiring: how counter-offers are re-pricing the senior bench

In this episode of The Science of Hiring, we sit down with a comp lead who sets bands for senior IT and AI/data roles inside a large GCC. Her core argument: the counter-offer used to be a retention tactic that trailed the market. Now, in the scarce senior segment, it is one of the first places the market re-prices — because an incumbent defending a person they can’t afford to lose will name a number no survey has seen. Listen for how she distinguishes a genuine market shift from a one-off retention spasm.

We walk through her working method: how she watches her own accept-and-decline flow, how she reads the counters her offers trigger, and why she now treats those as a leading indicator and published benchmarks as a lagging one. Roughly a quarter or two of lead, she estimates — enough to matter on the roles that move.

The back half of the conversation gets practical. Our guest lays out how a comp function can start reading its own signal without a data-science team: capture every counter your offers trigger, separate genuine market movement from panic retention, and let that flow inform your bands a beat before the survey does. She’s candid about the failure mode too — chasing every counter turns a leading indicator into a bidding war.

We close on governance: how to keep this discipline defensible to a compensation committee that (reasonably) wants an external anchor. Her answer is to use both — live counter flow to lead, published benchmarks to cross-check — and to write down which one you trusted when they disagreed. Full show notes and the timestamped chapters are below.