Optimizing Market Position in the Caribbean Development Bank
What’s the context?
The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) is a focused multilateral development bank (MDB) and international organization committed to fostering a strong community for its staff. To remain competitive, CDB has progressively refined its compensation strategy and closely monitored developments among comparator institutions.
What was the challenge?
Competition within the multilateral banking and international organization community can be quite demanding. While being a smaller institution, CDB faces direct competition from organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations, which have active programs in the same countries where CDB functions. In building its market model for setting salaries for its internationally recruited staff, CDB has found the greatest challenge in market competition has been for its more senior-level staff. CDB recognized that staying competitive in this area is essential to effectively serve the Caribbean region.
What was the solution?
In building the sample of comparator employers against which CDB would examine its levels of compensation, it recognized that the pay progression found in the development banks is indeed more aggressive for senior management roles than in other international organizations. As a result, CDB decided to give greater “weight” to the market data from the development banks, whereby 80% of the market reference would be drawn from these comparators for senior management roles.
What was the outcome?
By placing greater weight on development bank data for senior-level roles, CDB has been able to more closely match the progression of compensation found in these key comparators. Since this adjustment in market assessment was limited to senior roles, CDB has been able to sustain its critical market position in a very cost-effective manner by focusing on these critical roles where there are limited numbers of staff.
What’s the takeaway?
Refining comparator weighting in building the market sample is a very effective approach to targeting and optimizing market position. It enables an organization to focus on critical roles in a broader context of market positioning.
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