Director of Compensation

Accrue Partners; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Accrue Partners client seeks a Director-level compensation leader to partner with senior HR leadership and cross-functional teams to shape pay strategy, equity, and market competitiveness.

You will own assessments, benchmarking, salary structure evolution, and job architecture, delivering data-driven recommendations and practical plans for sustainable execution.

Qualifications

• Experience leading compensation strategy at Director level.
• Strong analytics, modeling, and benchmarking skills.
• Ability to partner with senior HR and finance.

Responsibilities

• Lead compensation assessments, market pricing and benchmarking, and evolve salary structures, pay grades, ranges, and job architecture.
• Analyze compression and pay-related trends; build financial models and scenario analyses; support merit increases, promotions, and market adjustments.

Job description

The client is seeking a Director-level compensation leader to join its HR leadership team and strengthen its people and compensation strategy. In this highly visible role, you will partner with senior HR leadership and cross-functional stakeholders across Finance, Talent Acquisition, HR Business Partners, Payroll, and business leadership to serve as a trusted compensation subject matter expert. You will help leaders make thoughtful, data-driven decisions related to pay, structure, internal equity, and market competitiveness, shaping the future compensation strategy through both strategic guidance and hands‑on analysis.

The Director role emphasizes ownership beyond administering existing programs. You will assess the current compensation environment, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop practical recommendations that balance market competitiveness, internal equity, employee retention, and financial discipline. Key focus areas include addressing pay compression, ensuring appropriate differentiation between roles and levels, and aligning job architecture, market benchmarking, salary ranges, and compensation decisions into a cohesive framework. The client expects a leader who can operate comfortably across strategy, analytics, and execution, and who can model solutions, explain tradeoffs, and support sustainable implementation.

Your responsibilities will include conducting compensation assessments, leading market pricing and benchmarking efforts, and evaluating and evolving salary structures, pay grades, ranges, job levels, and broader job architecture. You will analyze compensation compression and pay-related trends, build financial models and scenario analyses to understand cost and organizational impact, and support annual compensation planning activities such as merit increases, promotional and market adjustments, and incentive planning. You will establish consistent methodologies for job evaluation, leveling, market matching, and compensation decision-making, partner with HR and Talent Acquisition on new hire and promotion compensation as well as retention and difficult-to-price roles, align recommendations with budgeting and workforce planning with Finance, and develop compensation reporting and analytics to provide leadership visibility into trends, risks, and opportunities.