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September 29, 2022
4 min.
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“I think the true measure of any great HR/People tool isn’t just how easy it makes the life of the administrator (that’s table stakes), but whether it provides a meaningfully positive experience for the employees as well. Agora does both wonderfully.”
Turquoise Health is a rapidly growing health tech company. After securing $20M in Series A funding in May 2022, they are pursuing a mission of building the future of simpler healthcare transactions. They are building a fully-remote dream team to take their vision to the next step!
Turquoise is unique in the fact that they are still in their early years, but have a well defined compensation philosophy: they pay above market average and allow employees to have flexibility over the makeup of their total compensation.
“Although we pay very competitively, we’re not able to match the super high cash salaries offered by FAANG and the like. Instead, we’re able to offer more attractive equity grants with potential for significant upside.”
However, they realized that to achieve this they needed to better explain the equity portion of their offer. This meant being able to generate excitement about the potential upside of equity when extending offers, while never misrepresenting the value or misleading candidates.
An added complexity is that Turquoise often makes “flexible offers” - meaning candidates are given a choice if they would prefer their compensation be made up of more equity or a higher salary.
“We recognize that folks will be at various life stages and may have varying appetites for risk, so we offer the flexibility of choosing a total compensation package that aligns with their current circumstance.”
If a candidate was given the option of a flexible offer, it included complex spreadsheets where they could model what their paychecks might look like and what their equity could be worth in potential exit scenarios. However the spreadsheets sometimes caused further confusion and weren’t effective in generating excitement.
Explaining the offer to candidates often took a lot of time and involved many back and forth conversations with their recruiting team, which lengthened negotiations and ultimately, the time to get someone great into the role.
Ashkon Nosrat, who leads People Operations for Turquoise Health, was charged with figuring out a better solution for their offers. He wanted to be able to quickly create a more visual, interactive offer letter that allowed for both flexible offers and equity scenario modeling.
Agora helped Turquoise translate complicated spreadsheets and equity program details into consolidated offer letters with built in modeling tools. They customized their FAQs to address some of the most common questions candidates asked, as well as some questions candidates didn’t think to ask.
“We’d occasionally get questions about things like strike price and total funding, but we were actually more concerned about the folks who weren’t as familiar with equity grants and may not have thought to ask certain questions. We worked to proactively address this by including even more information in the offer summary, but struggled to do so elegantly and effectively, often only further crowding the already protracted document.”
Agora’s Offer Letter is built to handle limitless combinations of compensation and equity scenarios. We automatically track version history and allow for complex calculations and equity modeling scenarios.
The very first offer Turquoise sent through Agora was for a new leader in their product org:
We sent our first offer to a candidate for a leadership role we were really excited about. I'm happy to report they not only accepted, but specifically called out how much they loved the Agora format of the offer! They said as they were going through it they thought: “their HR really has it together!’”
In the first four months of sending offers, 18 out of 20 candidates have accepted and candidates are always making comments! This included their new in-house recruiter who emailed in their acceptance “I can’t wait to send these out to future candidates!”
Another candidate shared: "Thank you for sending this over! I'm so excited about this opportunity. The Agora offer form is the best I've seen - love how informative and clear it all is."
Ashkon also shared how it’s been going with flexible offers:
It’s been great! Instead of us having to list out various sample scenarios of the candidate choosing “high equity, low salary” vs “low equity, high salary” in a long document, candidates now have an interactive slider they can use to instantly see exactly how granular adjustments affect their annual compensation.
It has been awesome to work with Ashkon and the team at Turquoise Health. They are progressive thinkers with great compensation practices that care deeply about their people. We highly recommend checking out how they are disrupting healthcare pricing. While their mission is focused on making healthcare pricing more transparent, we’re excited to see them make compensation more transparent as well for their people.
Most candidates and employees never get to see — much less understand — the full value of their total rewards packages. Many companies are now turning to compensation software tools like Agora to communicate total rewards and boost employee hiring and retention.
From demystifying compensation to compelling equity offers, we’ve got you covered. Want to see how it works? Schedule a demo with our team.
Simplify your compensation practices and effectively communicate total rewards to your people.
