How TestGorilla is building one fair comp framework for a 40-country team using Ravio

TestGorilla is the global talent discovery platform that helps employers source and hire based on proven skills. Since launching in 2020, more than 60,000 organisations have used TestGorilla, and the platform now assesses 7 million candidates annually.

And the same logic is applied to their own pay decisions, with a core belief that employees should be compensated for their skills, not where they happen to live.

The company has around 130 team members distributed across 40 countries – and every one of them is paid based on the same European-wide benchmarks, regardless of whether they're based in London, Lagos, or Rio.

Making this location-agnostic approach work requires a compensation philosophy that is clear enough to defend to team members, managers, and finance, and a data foundation solid enough to build salary bands on. 

Ravio provides that foundation.

We spoke to Luis García de la Cruz (Senior People Partner) and Olive Turon (Head of People & Culture) about how TestGorilla built its compensation framework with Ravio.

Before Ravio: a compensation philosophy without the infrastructure to back it up

When Luis joined TestGorilla, the bold philosophy to pay everyone the same regardless of location was already in place – with the decision to use Europe-wide benchmarks as an effective proxy for global pay variations. 

But the data and infrastructure to support it wasn’t there.

Sourcing reliable Europe-wide benchmarks was proving particularly difficult.

“If you want ‘all of Europe’ from a provider like Korn Ferry, you need to buy Southern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, UK, Benelux, and Nordics separately, and then manually combine them into an average,” explains Luis. “You're paying for five or six different benchmarks when what you really want is one that combines them." 

The team was left building salary bands by hand – using free data to create company-wide pay ranges, with target percentiles the only way to account for differences per function or role (Engineering paid at a higher percentile, for instance, Support lower). 

Luis put his confidence in that data at five or six out of ten. And it was falling fast as the data they’d used aged.

To make their compensation philosophy truly defensible – to team members, hiring managers, the Executive team – Luis and Olive needed a single, reliable source of pan-European benchmarks that could be applied consistently across the entire organisation.

That's what brought them to Ravio.

How TestGorilla uses Ravio to operationalise a bold pay philosophy

Ravio gave Olive and Luis two core things: the data to interrogate their pay philosophy properly, and the tools to operationalise it once they were sure it held up.

One reliable benchmarking source for all of Europe

The decision to go with Ravio largely came down to one thing: breadth in Europe.

"The choice to go with Ravio was relatively easy internally, primarily because of the breadth of benchmarks on offer," says Luis. "You implement one platform and get access to data across the world – that's genuinely useful."

For a company benchmarking every role against pan-Europe, having a single source that covers the whole continent and makes combining it easy is a must.

With traditional providers, that meant buying five or six regional datasets and manually combining them. With Ravio, it's one.

For Luis, it’s also hugely valuable that Ravio’s technology-focused dataset aligns with the peer group they want to benchmark against. It ensures there are benchmarks available for all the roles they need, across all the locations they need, and with the ability to specify a technology industry filter.

"Looking back, there's some confidence in the old data, but we didn't have the filters, the geographic precision, or the functional mapping to know for certain," says Luis.

Easily building salary bands from that single, reliable source

TestGorilla used Ravio's salary band tool to build their ranges for each role and level – without the need to manually combine the benchmarks for each European company, or to spend hours in Excel designing the bands.

The team simply selects every European country as a geographic input, weighted roughly equally at around 4% each, and applies that to their band structure.

"We took every country in Europe, weighted them, took all the roles in a function, weighted those, benchmarked at the 50th percentile, and built bands with a range of 20% either side of the midpoint. This is where we hire," explains Luis.

The process runs across six functional groups: Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, Product, Marketing, and General & Administrative. Levels run from IC1 to IC7, with managers starting at IC4 – reflecting TestGorilla's view that impact is determined by level, not by whether someone manages a team.

Bands are refreshed once a year, ahead of the May compensation review. Luis monitors market movements throughout the year using Ravio's live data, but the team deliberately avoids mid-year adjustments to keep things predictable.

Transparency is also built in by design, with Ravio’s user permissions meaning that Olive and Luis can enable every team member to see their own pay range and the one above. 

Grounding hiring conversations in real-time market data

TestGorilla doesn't negotiate on pay for new hires – the band is the band. 

But being able to place that band in its local market context changes the quality of the conversation.

Salary bands are published in every job listing.

Then, when a candidate in London or Berlin comes back with expectations based on local rates, Luis can check the European benchmark against local market data in Ravio and see exactly where they stand.

Managing FX rates without pulling in Finance

TestGorilla pays most employees in EUR, with some in USD or GBP. Converting salary bands across currencies used to mean pulling in the Finance team every time rates needed updating.

Now Luis handles it directly in Ravio, applying a six-month moving average ahead of each performance cycle – less time on manual admin, more on the work that drives real impact. 

Backing difficult pay conversations with data

When an employee engagement survey flagged concerns about whether pay was keeping up with inflation, the team were able to bring Ravio data to an all-hands to show exactly how compensation decisions are made.

"We showed our average salary increase, what the market was doing, and the inflation rate across Europe,” explains Luis.

“We demonstrated that we were beating inflation and performing better than the average technology company. It was a powerful message – and we wouldn’t have been able to make it with confidence in an all-hands without having reliable market data to hand.” 

Similarly, for Olive, having reliable market data enables better conversations with finance colleagues. Going into budget season with reliable market data already in hand means proposed salary increases are grounded in evidence, never gut feel.

The impact: Before and after Ravio