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My company has grown exponentially in the past few years and its become necessary to divide my role - which encompasses accounting, IT, HR, administration, marketing, and facilities - into new positions that focus on only one thing each. They started by hiring a new IT person. Now they're thinking about bringing on someone to handle accounting - leaving me to handle HR matters and business development.

I've been with the company almost 12 years and I realize I can no longer the workload for ALL of the roles, but I'm feeling very frustrated because a. I have not been party to the decision or hiring process for these new positions (basically they've just told me "hey, so and so is starting next week and they're going to handle x going forward, can you go ahead and make sure everything is set up and ready to go for them?) and b. these new positions are being set with higher compensation than I am receiving.

Am I justified to feel irritated that a portion of my job is somehow more valuable to the company than the whole of my job? I should clarify that these new employees have similar work experience, qualifications, years of service, etc. as me and do not hold any special certifications like CPA, PMI, etc.

I did bring this up with the CEO and CFO recently and their response was that these people have more experience than I do (even though they don't) and that in order to bring on the "right" person they had had to offer higher salaries.

Looking for some feedback - what should I make of this? Is this just a not so subtle way of them telling I'm no longer valued by the organization and I should move on? Please provide any guidance you might have in how I should handle this.

TIA!

mmcconkie's picture

If I were the company, I would want to evaluate each position individually and compensate them based on the potential value that those positions (and those filling them) bring to the company. And I would imagine that while you may have similar time experience, the depth of that experience would be quite different. For example, if you've been fulfilling all of those roles for 12 years, your experience would be extremely different than someone who has focused exclusively on marketing for the last 12 years. I would expect that someone who has worked exclusively on marketing would be more effective in that role because they haven't had to divide their attention to other roles such as IT, HR, or administration. That is how I would justify paying this new hire more.

Next you should consider the concept of internal salary compression. These other individuals need to be paid more because they may need to put in more effort as they don't have the social capital that you do in the company. This is something that Mark has talked about in a few casts, and is a big driver for individuals changing companies (typically a shift to a new company brings a raise even if the new role is similar to the old role).

Bottom line is that I don't think that this is a message from your company telling you that you are no longer available. I would assume that you do still bring value, and that this will allow you to focus on one role.

Good luck!