Make defensible pay decisions faster.
Stratum turns the compensation structure you have today, whether mature, incomplete or messy, into a governed framework, then uses that framework, your people data and prior decisions to recommend what should happen next.
Rules govern. AI explains. Humans decide.
Built from experience across compensation and leadership roles at
Company names reflect prior professional experience and do not imply endorsement, partnership or customer status.
Your compensation team shouldn't be the human API for every pay decision.
Compensation work is fragmented across job architecture, market data, ranges, policies, employee data and decision history — each in its own tool or artifact, even though every pay decision depends on all of them. When a decision comes up, someone still has to pull that context together to make a defensible recommendation.
✦ Same analysis. Again.
Find the range. Check internal peers. Look at the reporting manager relationship. Review policy. Search for comparable prior decisions and consider the downstream impact.
✦ Same explanation. Again.
Explain the decision to the recruiter, translate the reasoning for the hiring manager and summarize the tradeoffs for People and Compensation.
✦ Same context. Lost again.
The reasoning ends up in email, Slack or someone's memory. When that person leaves, the next similar decision starts without the context of what came before it.
Stratum brings that infrastructure together so the work stays connected from foundation to decision, instead of being rebuilt across separate tools every time.
Request accessExtend your compensation team without adding headcount.
Stratum does the analysis, brings the evidence and context together, and recommends a defensible path. Your team decides the action.
Build it. Govern it. Decide. Remember it.
Stratum meets a company where it is, turns what exists into a governed framework, then uses that framework on every decision that follows.
Build / Rebuild
Bring Stratum what you already have. Employee data, ranges, philosophy, policies and company context. Stratum identifies what exists, what is missing and what needs clarification.
Govern
Turn that information into explicit compensation rules, assumptions and known observations, then review and lock the framework.
Decide
Stratum evaluates real compensation decisions against the locked framework, candidate evidence, internal equity, reporting relationships and prior decisions, then recommends a defensible path.
Remember
Every decision and rationale becomes institutional memory that informs the next one.
Compensation is more than offers and promotions.
External Offer is available now. Additional compensation decisions and workflows will be added as Stratum expands.
Individual compensation decisions that come up all year.
External Offer
Build or evaluate a candidate offer against your locked framework, candidate evidence, internal equity, the reporting manager relationship, Growth Capacity and comparable prior decisions.
Promotion
Level change, new range placement and the downstream internal-equity impact.
Candidate Counteroffer
Respond to candidate negotiation without losing internal context.
Retention
Evaluate a retention action for an existing employee and the precedent it creates.
Off-Cycle Increase
Evaluate a pay increase outside the normal review cycle.
Market Adjustment
Evaluate market-driven corrections against the current structure and peers.
Internal Transfer
Handle role or location changes and the resulting pay treatment.
Other Workflows
Work that supports and feeds governed pay decisions.
Recurring Programs
Compensation work that runs on a cadence, not one employee at a time.
High-Stakes Work
Where context, consistency and downstream impact matter most.
One decision. Four audiences.
One External Offer, explained the way each person needs to hear it.
What should I take back to the candidate?
The recommended offer and a candidate-facing total rewards view — base, bonus, sign-on, equity and the three-year illustration — in language that can leave the building.
What can we reasonably offer and why?
The recommendation and the tradeoffs: what moving up or down costs against internal peers, the reporting manager relationship and the room left in the range.
Show me the full analysis.
Internal equity, the reporting manager relationship, policy alignment against your configured governance, Growth Capacity and comparable precedent — each with its finding, evidence, methodology and source.
Why was this decision made?
The evidence Stratum used, the recommendation it made, the rationale the human wrote and the prior decisions that informed it — kept together as the record.
The explanation changes by audience. The governed compensation logic underneath it does not.
Bring your compensation infrastructure together.
Compensation work is fragmented across job architecture, market data, ranges, governance, people data and decision history. Stratum brings that infrastructure together, then uses the connected context to recommend what should happen next.
Benchmarking
Tells you what the market pays.
Useful for pricing jobs and setting ranges- Market information is one input to a company decision
Stratum
Brings your compensation infrastructure together and recommends what should happen next.
Market data comes from the providers you already use. Stratum is not the market data source.
- Connects job architecture, market data, ranges, governance, people + pay and decision history
- Evaluates each decision against your own governed framework
- Shows the recommendation, the evidence and the tradeoffs
- Preserves the human rationale and the outcome
External Offer decisions are live today. The broader connected foundation is rolling out to design partners as it ships.
HRIS
Records what ultimately happened.
- System of record for employee and pay data
- Usually not the system of record for why
See what goes into the recommendation.
A recommendation is only worth as much as what it read first. Four of the things a single External Offer decision brings together before it proposes anything.
A starting point you can defend out loud.
- The applicable range for the role, level and geo tier
- The placement governance you configured
- Confirmed job-relevant candidate evidence
- The candidate's stated minimum and any competing offer
- The requisition cap and the reporting manager
Comes out as a recommended base — $210,000 in the illustrative record — inside the hiring zone the company set, with plain answers to why not lower and why not higher.
Measured against the people already doing the work.
- Same job, same level, same geo tier first
- Each comparator's current base and compa-ratio
- The minimum group size before Stratum will widen
- Your choice of alternate group when it cannot
Stratum never widens into adjacent jobs or levels on its own. In the illustrative record the group is 7 people, $204,000 to $227,100.
The whole package, carried forward three years.
- Base, target bonus, sign-on and equity vest
- Your configured expected annual merit assumption (4% here)
- 401(k) match and employer benefits value, when supplied
A percentage-based bonus and a salary-based match rise as base rises, and the whole table exports for the recruiter or the candidate.
What this company already decided, and why.
- Prior decisions matching the type, job, level and geo tier
- The rationale a human wrote on each one
- The framework version each decision cited
Precedent is evidence, not authority — an earlier call is never on its own a reason to repeat it.
Figures shown here and in the demo are illustrative. Every one is tied to a range, a configured company rule, a candidate input or a planning assumption.
Built for compensation complexity in the U.S.
Compensation complexity does not wait for a large Total Rewards team. Stratum is built for growing U.S. organizations where decisions happen faster than anyone can rebuild the analysis by hand.
Multi-state teams
Different labor markets, geographic strategies and salary-range practices.
Pay transparency
More states and local jurisdictions require compensation disclosure, raising the bar for defensible ranges, consistent practice and explanations that hold up.
Lean Total Rewards teams
Decisions keep happening even when there is not a large team to analyze each one.
Internal equity
A reasonable decision for one person can create a problem somewhere else.
Decision history
The next decision should know what the company did before, and why.
Private design-partner access
We're working with compensation and People leaders to refine Stratum around the decisions they handle every day.
Questions people actually ask
How Stratum fits alongside your HRIS and benchmarking tools, what it decides today, and what design partner access includes.
Help shape how compensation decisions get made.
We're working with compensation and People leaders to refine Stratum around the decisions they handle every day.
Request access