From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Courtney Vinopal

hr-brew.com

Graphic on attitudes on the future of fertility benefits

Graph showing attitudes about employer fertility benefits.

Graph showing the share of surveyed employees who receive fertility benefits.

Democrats hold a press conference on IVF.

Firms likely to expand fertility benefits after Alabama IVF ruling

While fertility treatments remain a rare employer benefit, 63% of US respondents say companies should offer them, according to a HR Brew/Harris Poll survey.

Most HR pros say companies are likely to expand, not reduce, fertility benefits

An office manager sitting at a desk in front of two computers with money floating around her

Tech is changing the game for compensation managers

An explosion of data coupled with advancements in tech means auditing compensation is now a year-round endeavor for HR. 

Heart shaped sticky note labeled "out of office" on a calendar

Why Crunchbase gives employees time off to volunteer 

Crunchbase, a private company data provider, has been offering “volunteering time off” (VTO) to its employees since 2018.

A present icon denoting total rewards and compensation

Total Rewards (Comp & Benefits)

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

A proposed compensation package that could make Tesla CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire has drawn critics ranging from the electric vehicle maker’s own investors to Pope Leo, who decried wealth disparities in a recent sermon.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because the Tesla board has already tried once to push through a massive pay package, 

 by a Delaware court. Tesla is appealing that decision, but in the meantime, the board plans to put to a vote an even bigger awards package at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in November. This comes amid declining sales at the EV maker, whose US market share dropped to the lowest level in 

The proposed package is not likely to look familiar to HR professionals who have worked on executive compensation, as the board thwarted traditional benchmarking standards in designing it.

 published on Sept. 5, Tesla outlined a “2025 CEO Performance Award” that would grant Musk additional shares provided his company meets certain benchmarks, including:

Growing Tesla’s market capitalization to at least $8.5 trillion, up from $1.1 trillion today

Getting 10 million subscribers to sign up for Tesla’s full self-driving technology

Having 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation

Musk must also participate in CEO succession planning to receive part of the award, which spans over 10 years. The additional shares in the proposed plan would give him a 25% stake in the company, and if Musk meets all the targets, his pay could grow to $1 trillion.

Why Musk’s pay package bucks traditional executive compensation practices. 

Compensation committees typically design CEO pay packages through a process called benchmarking. If Tesla took this approach, it might have looked at what CEOs earn at 

 companies and other public firms with a similar market capitalization, and then set Musk’s pay as a percentile of that.

The committee overseeing Musk’s 2025 compensation plan decided against this approach, though, after determining “that chief executive officers at other comparably large companies are not being presented with performance goals comparable in scope, degree, or complexity to those being asked of Mr. Musk,” according to the proxy filing. Traditional benchmarking would be “irrelevant,” the committee argued, as no other company has similar goals to Musk’s, which include transforming Tesla and bettering “society as a whole.”

Regardless of how Tesla’s board landed on the design of this proposal, it seems likely he’ll continue to out-earn the median worker at his company by a long shot—a quality he’ll share with other CEOs in his peer group.

“His own median worker is making $57,000 while he is awarded a pay package that could add up to $1 trillion by being a part-time CEO,” Natalia Renta, associate director of the progressive group Americans for Financial Reform, told 

, characterizing the proposal as “outrageous.”

Heightened scrutiny around the growing gap between what CEOs earn compared to their employees is just one of the factors HR leaders have to take into account when navigating executive pay, HR Brew 

. CHROs and their colleagues may also need to consider whether the justification for granting their CEO a generous compensation package is strong, as well as whether their board is sufficiently independent, when defending such proposals before shareholders and workers.

Elon Musk jumping as dollar bills fall around him

Why Elon Musk’s $1T pay package is unlike most CEO awards 

 The committee overseeing Musk’s compensation said benchmarking his pay to other CEOs would be “irrelevant” in light of the goals he’s been asked to achieve.

Elon Musk’s proposed $1-trillion pay package bucks traditional executive compensation norms

Compensation platform Payscale is acquiring Datapeople, an AI-powered recruiting platform, the company announced on Sept. 16.

Payscale executives say they hope Datapeople’s features will help talent acquisition (TA) and recruiting professionals think more strategically about compensation in their job postings, and remain compliant with pay transparency laws taking effect across the world.

Bridging the gap between compensation and talent. 

Datapeople, which launched in 2015, helps compensation and talent professionals write and edit job descriptions that integrate with their applicant tracking systems. The software also has a feature that monitors compliance with pay transparency laws, and flags any job postings that are missing salary information.

Its compliance capabilities were of particular interest to Payscale, as they align with how the company thinks about pay transparency and compensation strategy, explained Peh Keong Teh, chief product officer.

 that require them to post salary ranges for open roles, Payscale sees an opportunity for compensation, recruiting, and TA teams to be more aligned, Teh said. He described the “typical process” for pay transparency currently as being “manual and disconnected,” with hiring managers drafting a job description before it’s reviewed by the compensation team to benchmark the role and determine salary ranges.

Integrating these two processes into one workflow should “drive much better standardization, compliance,” and ultimately help organizations fulfill their pay transparency and pay equity goals, he predicted.

Driven by a belief that pay transparency “starts at the very beginning” of the hiring process, Payscale hopes integrating Datapeople into its platform will allow “the hiring manager, the TA person, to make sure that the postings they’re putting out are as compliant as possible,” said Payscale CEO Chris Hays.

Over the next four months, Payscale will integrate Datapeople’s products into its portfolio, Teh said.

While Payscale’s typical customers currently work in the total rewards space, Hays said the company hopes this acquisition will strengthen its value for TA professionals and hiring managers. Eventually the company may monetize certain functions geared toward these customers, but such discussions are still in development, Hays said.

As compensation becomes more complex, vendors like Payscale are 

 to help HR pros make better pay decisions. In a 

 regarding new AI solutions that the company rolled out in May, Hays spoke to the critical role data plays in helping HR and business leaders “make decisions about any job, anytime, anywhere.”

It seems Datapeople’s tools help Payscale expand on this vision, as the startup provides analytics based on more than 100 million job posts and candidate outcomes. This capability, Hays said, is “very attractive to us from a data asset perspective.”

Social media hologram icons over two hands shaking

Payscale is acquiring recruiting platform Datapeople

Executives with the compensation platform said they hope the acquisition will create a more streamlined process for recruiting talent while complying with pay transparency.

Payscale is acquiring Datapeople to better align compensation and TA functions

The gender wage gap widened in 2024 for the second consecutive year, according to new figures released by the US Census Bureau.

Women working full-time earned a median salary equivalent to 81% of what their male counterparts earned in 2024, down from 83% the year prior, according to 

. The median man working full-time saw his earnings climb to $71,090, up 3.7% from the previous year, while the median salary for women stayed flat, at $57,520.

This is the first time the gender pay gap has widened for two years in a row—a worrying trend for advocates that hoped policies like pay transparency would help lessen this disparity.

Pay transparency laws that began taking effect in some states in the US about five years ago have 

 to share information about how they pay their workers—and in turn, correct wage gaps within their organizations that can’t be explained by legitimate factors, like differences in experience or education.

But the gender wage gap persists in the US workforce due to a variety of factors that can’t be fixed by HR teams alone. Women 

 in low-paying occupations, and tend to take career breaks more frequently than men, which in turn 

 to perform the lion’s share of housework and caregiving in their households, which may lead them to make decisions that could affect their wages, such as working part-time or prioritizing a flexible schedule.

Such disparities even cycle up to the C-suite, where compensation for executives in female-dominated positions—notably CHROs—trends lower, HR Brew 

 in senior leadership roles, in part because they lack the proper support to ascend to higher levels in their organizations.

There’s a fear that “the gap will only continue to widen as DE&I programs and protections are cut, weakening the very structures designed to create equity,” Tracy Ariail Aldworth, board president with Women in Technology, 

HR teams can consider certain benefits and programs to mitigate trends that perpetuate the gender pay gap, according to sources who’ve spoken with us previously. Subsidized childcare and flexibility, for example, are often cited as features that can help women stay in their jobs for longer, and move into higher-paying roles.

Being transparent about the tradeoffs that may come with certain career decisions, too, 

 make more informed decisions about their jobs.

Two workers stand on stacks of coins, one much taller than the other

Why the US gender pay gap widened, again

Employers can prioritize benefits that may mitigate trends that perpetuate the gender pay gap, such as a lack of access to childcare.

The US gender pay gap widened for the second year in a row

Mikaela Cohen

Love it or hate it, everyone in HR has an opinion on unlimited paid time off.

Just 7% of US companies offer unlimited PTO, the Wall Street Journal 

. And 30% of private employers that don’t, instead offer their employees an average of 10–14 PTO days a year after one year on the job, according to 

 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employees with unlimited PTO take an average of 16 days off annually, a 2024 SHRM 

, while those afforded a specific number of days take an average of 14.

Some HR pros have said that unlimited PTO policies can be 

, which can lead to over and underutilization of the benefit. The latter can lead to higher rates of 

That was the case at Bolt. Its CEO, Ryan Breslow, 

 in July that the fintech company “killed unlimited PTO” because “it’s totally broken.”

“We looked at the data really on how often people were taking time off internally,” Kelly Lawson Pihl, Bolt’s head of people operations, told HR Brew. “[It] skewed towards higher performers were not taking enough time off, and others maybe took a little bit more advantage of that ambiguity.”

Bolt’s unlimited PTO policy dates back to its founding in 2014 and was the norm for its remote workforce of about 130 full-time employees in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa until July. Its new policy grants all global employees a specific amount of PTO annually. Bolt’s roughly 80 US-based employees, for example, get 20 PTO days. (PTO taken prior to the policy change will not be counted toward the 20 days this year, Lawson Pihl said.)

Lawson Pihl said she wanted to address the “high discrepancy” between employees taking too much and too little time off. Under the unlimited policy, she said some employees, especially high performers, were taking as little as one or two days off per year, while others were taking more than 20 days.

“There’s too much confusion on how to utilize this unlimited policy. I think it sounds really progressive and good on paper, but in practice, again, it created this imbalance, created this discrepancy, and then confusion,” she said.

In switching to a traditional PTO policy, Lawson Pihl said she hopes more employees will feel empowered to take time to relax and recharge, especially high-performing employees, who may be more prone to burnout.

“To provide that clarity really gave people the ability to say, ‘Okay, I have this. I know it’s expected, and I know that I should be taking this off,’” she said. “‘In fact, my team, my managers, leaders, people ops, really expects it. It’s not just ambiguous and there.’”

Different countries have different cultural expectations when it comes to time off, Lawson Pihl said. US employees, for example, 

 time off than their counterparts in other Western countries. People leaders can help encourage them to take more time by setting a standard for the “sacredness” of days off, she said.

“[Make] sure that managers discuss with their team a clear point of contact when that person is off, to not ‘at’ them or ping them in Slack messages, if at all possible, and to do schedule sends for when they’re back on,” she said. “Those day-to-day tactical things that managers and team members can do to help make this more of an actual time that people can unplug.”

HR leaders reevaluating their PTO policy should solicit employee feedback on what is and isn’t working so they can make a data-driven decision, Lawson Pihl advised.

“Figure out the problem that you’re trying to solve first and then work backwards from there,” she said. “Give folks the resources and tools to be able to understand and utilize fully whatever policy you go with.”

illustration of post it that reads out of office

Why fintech company Bolt eliminated its unlimited time off policy

The goal was to close the gap between employees over and underutilizing the benefit, Kelly Lawson Pihl, Bolt’s head of people operations, tells HR Brew.

If you’re a total rewards leader who’s just hearing about an 

individual coverage health reimbursement arrangement (ICHRA)

, it’s likely because the option has only been around for the last five years.

It may also be because this type of benefit—which allows employers to offer pre-tax dollars so employees can purchase their own individual health plan, rather than elect coverage through a group plan—is not currently the predominant form of employer-sponsored healthcare. Just 4% of firms offering health benefits gave workers funds to purchase non-group health insurance in 2024, according to a 

Still, this option may be of interest to small employers that wouldn’t otherwise be able to offer health coverage to their workers, or businesses with specific employee populations. Here are three questions for HR teams considering offering an ICHRA, according to industry experts.

The answer to this question depends on the size of the employer and how they view their role as a benefits provider, said Josh Miley, ICHRA solution leader with consulting firm WTW.

“If you’re a small employer or a startup, the reason why you would do an ICHRA is because it gives you a manageable entry point into offering benefits,” he said. Employers with fewer than 50 workers aren’t required to offer health insurance, but ICHRAs generally have a lower barrier to entry, as they don’t have requirements such as minimum participation rates.

Larger employers that are thinking about switching from a group health plan to an ICHRA will need to consider “cost and complexity,” Miley said. As health costs 

 and HR teams are tasked with “the administrative burden” of managing a complex ecosystem of brokers, vendors, compliance, and regulatory professionals for their healthcare, they may want to evaluate whether these efforts are commensurate with the value employees get out of the benefits, he said.

When doing an analysis to determine whether an ICHRA makes financial sense for the organization, HR leaders should look at not only how the cost of group-sponsored plans compares to the cost of similar plans on the individual market, but also whether workers would have “meaningful choice” if offered an ICHRA, said Miley. The price and quality of individual plans can vary greatly in different states, so employers should consider factors like how many carriers are located in the regions where their workers are based, or whether they offer lower-deductible plans, such as a gold plan.

HR leaders should also try to get a sense of employees’ appetite for ICHRAs when considering who would benefit, said Julia Zuckerman, VP and senior consultant in Segal’s compliance practice. Many companies take a “paternalistic” approach to healthcare coverage, and employees are typically happy to let them lead. But she noted “there are definitely some people interested in more choice, and who are more sophisticated and motivated to think about the best coverage options for them.”

Should your executive leadership team decide they want to offer an ICHRA plan to the workforce, there’s a fair amount of change management that has to happen ahead of the rollout, particularly for larger employers switching from group coverage.

HR teams should anticipate questions from employees about what the process looks like for buying a health plan themselves, as well as communicate about issues that may come up when the employer isn’t managing the plan for them, Miley said. Workers should know that they may lose coverage if they miss a premium payment, for example, or see a dependent lose coverage when they turn 26.

Successfully transitioning from an ICHRA requires “educating your employee population,” said Ben Light, VP of partnerships with Zorro, an ICHRA platform. Leadership can help employees understand that this is a new way to elect healthcare coverage, and make sure they know what information to secure ahead of time—such as potential doctors, facilities, and medications—in order to choose the right plan.

Illustration of an open hand with a coin on the left and an open hand in a doctor's white coat with a heart that has a cross in the middle

How to decide if an ICHRA is right for your company

Giving workers money to purchase their own health plan isn’t yet a widespread practice, but it may be the right call for certain types of organizations.

3 questions to ask when considering an ICHRA 

Should you hear your colleagues in HR talking about peanut butter, you might be disappointed to find out they’re not actually planning to restock the office pantry.

Instead, they may be referring to the decidedly less tasty practice of compensation planning. In the total rewards world, “peanut butter” pay can refer to giving workers flat raises across the board, in the same way you might spread the snack evenly across a piece of toast.

 it would switch to the peanut butter approach, giving all salaried employees in North America the same 2% raise, rather than allowing managers to grant merit raises at their discretion. The shift is part of a broader turnaround effort that necessitates cost containment, the coffee chain said.

Granting flat raises isn’t unusual when companies are dealing with tighter budgets, experts told HR Brew, but employers should clearly communicate the strategy behind this decision, and consider its implications for performance management.

US employers expect to give employees a 3.5% raise, on average, next year, according to a 

 from Payscale. A majority of those who expect to scale back their compensation budgets cited concern about “future economic conditions or business performance.”

Such trends may play into employers’ decision to grant flat raises, said Megan Nail, VP of the total rewards practice at insurance broker NFP. “When budgets come down…it lends itself towards companies thinking more across the board, because they have fewer dollars to work with,” she said.

There are some upsides to the peanut butter approach, Nail said. Flat raises are easier to administer than those granted under a pay-for-performance system, and may be perceived as more fair by employees. That being said, HR leaders should clearly explain the rationale if their organization is changing its approach, she added, and be honest about “what they don’t know right now.”

When talking about decisions surrounding pay, “it’s helpful for an organization to be clear about the hows, whats, and whys,” said Ron Seifert, senior client partner at Korn Ferry. If a company is facing operational challenges, investing in other parts of the business, or navigating an uncertain economic environment due to tariffs, those details can help them shape their messaging.

HR teams, according to multiple professionals we spoke to, could consider how different members of their workforce may be affected by pay decisions. Lower-paid employees are particularly sensitive to inflation, so a flat raise may be important when you consider their ability to cover costs of everyday items like food or gas, said Seifert.

On the other hand, a potential negative effect of granting flat raises is that top performers may become dissatisfied with how they’re rewarded.

To ensure top performers are still recognized, HR could consider rewarding them with non-monetary benefits, such as career development initiatives, specialized mentorship, as well as access to leadership or new technologies, Seifert said.

Diane Burton, who directs the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said she’s seen “lots of experimentation on the benefits side” to this end. During lean years, HR teams may put “increasing emphasis on learning and growth opportunities, and developmental opportunities.”

Such efforts may help mitigate the effects of peanut butter pay. “If you spread peanut butter too thin, you actually don’t taste it, and it isn’t very satisfying,” Seifert noted.

Why companies like Starbucks are switching to “peanut butter” pay 

Employers may decide to grant all workers the same raise when budgets shrink, but doing so may have implications for retaining top performers.  

The costs and benefits of awarding flat raises during down years

Kristen Parisi

Despite some global efforts to level the playing field for working parents through legislation and employee benefits, fathers in one wealthy nation still don’t have wide access to leave.

 The UK has tried to make it easier for more people to juggle work and parenting more, passing in 2014 legislation allowing mothers and fathers who work for the same employer to share up to 50 weeks of parental leave, Bloomberg 

The government hoped this legislation would encourage fathers to take on more caregiving responsibilities, but research published this year in the Cambridge Journal of Economics found that only 5% of eligible dads in the UK are taking advantage of the benefit. And it’s negatively affecting the people who do use it, according to research shared with Bloomberg from University College London, King’s Business School, and City St. George’s, University of London. Fathers who took leave experienced saw their hourly pay decrease by 3.5%, while women saw theirs cut by less than 1%.

“Even the gender-neutral policies on flexible working may inadvertently exacerbate gender inequalities in labor force participation by pushing women more into part-time work,” Baowen Xue, a lecturer in social epidemiology and quantitative methods at University College London, told Bloomberg.

Critics of the shared leave policy claim the program is difficult to navigate and littered with red tape, according to 

“Most people in the UK work for SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and it’s just totally unrealistic to expect a pub or gardening business to have the HR capacity needed to get shared parental leave set up,” George Gabriel, co-founder of the Dad Shift said.

Fathers in the UK are still guaranteed just two weeks of leave, on reduced pay, making them less likely to take it, HR Brew previously 

. The UK has been ranked as one of Europe’s worst paternity leave plans; the Princess of Wales has 

 Several countries, including Finland, Colombia, and South Korea, have tried to make parental leave more equitable in recent years, especially as birth rates in industrialized countries have fallen. The results have been mixed so far, but Finland, which provides 160 days of paid leave to both parents, has seen some success. The paternity leave rate has doubled since 2022, when the law went into effect.

Sweden expanded paternity leave nearly 50 years ago, with success for employers and new parents, the BBC 

. Amanda Lundeteg, head of Allbright, a business diversity nonprofit, said that companies “are using parental leave as an employer-branding strategy…something that many parents really appreciate when they apply for jobs.”