During the Great Resignation, staff came to me weekly asking for more money. I had to keep saying no.

At the peak of the Great Resignation, I was having the same conversation on repeat.

A team member would come to me, sometimes weekly, to let me know they had been contacted about another role. Not interviewed. Contacted. LinkedIn messages, recruiter calls, offers landing in inboxes from companies they had never approached. The numbers being floated were significant. In some cases, eyewatering.

And my answer, more often than not, had to be no.

Not because we did not value these people. Not because we did not want to keep them. But because we had compensation bands, and we had to hold them. We were a scaling startup. We did not have the balance sheet of a large tech company, and pretending otherwise, making exceptions, matching offers, letting the bands collapse under pressure, would have created problems that outlasted the resignation wave by years.

Saying no, over and over, to people I genuinely wanted to stay was difficult! 

To understand the pressure of that period, you have to understand what was happening in the market. The offers being dangled in front of our people were not always coming from direct competitors. They were coming from large tech companies, organisations with funding, scale and salary structures that a startup like ours simply could not match. And in many cases, the people receiving those offers had not even put their hand up. They were being recruited passively, which meant the conversation I was having was not "someone went looking and found something better." It was "someone found them and told them they were worth more than we were paying them."

That is a psychologically different conversation. And it is a much harder one to navigate.

What I held onto, what I had to hold onto, was that compensation is one dimension of why people stay. It is an important one. It is not the only one.

We could not compete on base salary with companies that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We could compete on other things. The quality of the work: technically interesting, the kind of problems that don’t exist at companies large enough to have already solved them. A culture that was real, built deliberately over years. Career progression that actually meant something, because in a team our size you could own things, be visible, and grow faster than you ever would inside a large function where your remit is a narrow slice of someone else’s strategy.

These are not consolation prizes. They are genuine value propositions. But they require belief, in the company, in the direction, in the people leading it, and not everyone was in that place.

What I didn’t fully anticipate about holding the line on compensation was this. It was a filter.

The people who left, and some did leave, I will not pretend otherwise, left for organisations that could offer them more money. Some of those decisions were entirely rational and I respect them. When someone has a mortgage and a family and a significantly larger number on the table, the answer is not always going to be to stay.

But the people who stayed made a choice. They weighed the offer, they weighed what they had at Compono, and they decided to stay. That act of choosing, of staying when leaving was genuinely an option, changed something about the team. It crystallised who we were. The people in the room after the Great Resignation were the people who genuinely wanted to be there, not just the people who had not been approached yet.

Our average staff tenure is 7 years. We are proud of this, especially knowing that many of our founding employees are still with us. We have also observed that those who left for larger salary packages often moved between roles frequently afterward. I do not think this average tenure over 7 years exists without that difficult period. It was painful, yes. But it tested the foundation, and the foundation held.

What I would say to any people leader navigating a similar moment, whether it is another resignation wave, another hot market, another period where your people are being courted by organisations with deeper pockets, is this.

Hold the bands. Not rigidly, not without review, not without making sure your compensation framework is genuinely fair and grounded in market data. But hold the principle behind them.

Because the moment you start making exceptions under pressure, you create a culture where the way to get a pay rise is to generate external offers. Where people who are loyal and not actively looking are quietly falling behind people who play the market. Where your compensation strategy is being written by recruiters at other companies, not by your own deliberate thinking about what you value and what you can sustain.

Then there is the long-term impact that is often overlooked. When the market turned and redundancies became a reality, those inflated salaries became a significant liability. Companies found themselves with cost structures that were difficult to adjust. It became impossible to restructure effectively when salaries were tied to unsustainable, bubble-era market rates, leaving organisations in a precarious position.

And so my advice is - compete on everything else!

Hard. With complete honesty about what you can and cannot offer. The people who choose you when they have options are the people you actually want. And understanding who those people actually are, before you hire them, is where the real work starts. 

Tamara O'Sullivan is Chief People Officer at Compono with 20+ years people experience, where she has led people strategy across the full lifecycle of a scaleup.