Frequently Asked Questions

Kamsa is a compensation management platform designed to help companies make fair, strategic pay decisions.

It brings together everything you need to manage employee compensation in one place — including:

• Global market compensation data (cash and equity)
• Tools for job leveling and career pathing (job architecture)
• Compensation range creation and modeling
• Planning and running compensation reviews

Whether you're building your first pay structure or scaling globally, Kamsa helps you align pay with your business goals — and keeps it fair, consistent, and clear.

Kamsa, pronounced kahm-sah, means appreciation in Korean. Kamsa is all about appreciating your most valuable asset - your people, by paying them fairly.

Kamsa’s market data is built from anonymized employee data provided by our clients — not scraped from public sources or self-reported by individuals.

We’ve supported over 1,000 companies across 60+ countries, primarily in tech, professional services, and other fast-growing industries. Most of our clients have under 1,000 employees, so our benchmarks are especially relevant to scaling teams.

Our dataset includes:

• Data from 60+ countries
• Over 2,000 distinct jobs — aligned to standardized job families and levels

How we ensure accuracy:

Every data point goes through a multi-step validation process:

• Machine learning identifies outliers and inconsistencies
• Our compensation experts review job matches and level alignment
• We refresh cash data quarterly and equity data annually

We don’t just collect data — we clean it, standardize it, and help tailor compensation ranges to fit your company’s structure and strategy.

Companies who need reliable global market compensation data, perform compensation reviews, and are venture backed and/or in the tech industry benefit from Kamsa. Companies who value paying employees fairly and want to ensure they attract and retain top talent, globally, also benefit greatly from Kamsa’s features.

It costs companies 2X an employee’s salary to replace them if they leave. The most common reasons employees will leave your company is lack of growth opportunities and/or competitive pay. Kamsa helps ensure companies are paying competitively against the market, as well as transparent with career paths and job levels across your organization

With our Compensation Review tool, Kamsa allows you to customize performance rating scales and categories. The performance ratings can be included as a data point during compensation review so managers can use it as a data point to make the best pay decisions for their employees.

Kamsa was founded by our CEO, Lola Han. Before starting Kamsa in 2017, she was in roles like Head of Compensation at companies like Zendesk, as well as a compensation consultant at Willis Towers Watson and Ernst & Young. Over time, she realized the routine compensation initiatives that all companies do, like job level across the organization, use reliable market data to establish compensation ranges, and run a compensation review, was so painful. There was no good solution in the market that not only provided reliable market data, but also helped get sh*it done efficiently, so we built it ourselves.

Yes, we integrate with various HRISs!

The implementation fee and subscription cost varies based on employee size, as well as the package chosen. Contact us for a detailed quote.

After an agreement is signed, you’ll fill out a census data file. Your Implementation Consultant typically takes ~3 business days to organize your employees' data and provide access to Kamsa. A Kick-Off meeting will be scheduled & you’ll confirm job levels and job matches over the next couple of weeks.

Kamsa leverages machine learning technology to match your employees’ jobs against market, quickly. We job level your employees to ensure the market data is accurate. Kamsa also provides market data across 60+ countries, and it’s refreshed on a quarterly basis, to keep the data as real-time as possible.

Kamsa also offers: 

Expert compensation consultants 

Our compensation experts partner with you to not only strategize compensation priorities, but help get the sh*t done. We’re here to support your compensation reviews, market price jobs, benchmark executive compensation, or re-think your compensation philosophy or equity grant program. We have custom projects and packages to meet all your unique needs.

Comprehensive job leveling and career paths onboarding

We’ll help conduct  job leveling and establish career paths across your entire org so you are not left having to spend many months doing this. On average, this process takes only 2 to 3 weeks to complete.

Integrated compensation planning & review 

Kamsa’s Compensation Review tool helps budget quickly and remove the heavy burden of running your compensation reviews. It rolls it up to all the desired approval chain (the hell with spreadsheets!) and recommends the salary increase guidelines by work location/country based on latest market data.

Kamsa is a hybrid solution (tech product + consulting) to help make compensation painless for companies!

At Kamsa, we place the utmost importance on security and client privacy. Protecting employee data is not just a priority — it’s embedded in everything we do.  

All employee data is kept strictly confidential and individual responses are reported anonymously and in aggregate.

Kamsa is fully SOC 2, Type II compliant, having successfully completed annual audits conducted by an accredited CPA firm. Our GDPR compliance ensures alignment with global data protection standards, and we implement robust measures to safeguard against data breaches.  

Here are some of the proactive steps we take to ensure data security:  

• SOC 2, Type II Compliance: We undergo a rigorous, independent audit every year to validate our adherence to the highest security and data protection standards.  
• Regular Vulnerability Assessments: A third-party security company conducts vulnerability assessments on the Kamsa platform at least twice a year.  
• Penetration Testing: At least annually, third-party experts perform penetration testing to identify and address potential security weaknesses.  
• Brute Force Protection: Robust mechanisms are in place to prevent brute force attacks on our systems.  
• Data Encryption & Firewalls: All data is encrypted and stored securely behind enterprise-grade firewalls.  
• Restricted Access: Access to sensitive data is strictly limited to authorized personnel and remains securely stored.  
• VPN Protection: All work involving sensitive data is conducted over VPNs to prevent interception.  
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA is enforced for accessing the most sensitive areas of the Kamsa platform.  
• Secure Client Communication: Kamsa requires all client browsers to communicate exclusively through secure, encrypted connections.  
• Vendor Security Standards: Any third-party vendors or tools we engage are required to meet or exceed GDPR compliance and implement equally stringent security measures.  

All information shared with us is encrypted and handled with the highest level of confidentiality. For more details, please review our Privacy Statement.  

By implementing these measures, we provide our clients with the confidence that their employee data is not only secure but managed with unwavering care and diligence.

• Your Kamsa Consultant(s) assigned to your company will be able to view your employee’s data (e.g., from your HRIS) so they may better assist you with analyzing your employee’s pay.
• Certain software engineers (limited number) working on developing Kamsa and investigating potential bugs may also view employee data in order to reproduce client issues. 
• No one else within Kamsa may see company or employee data unless actively engaged in assisting client(s).

• Client’s users are linked to gain access to their own company’s workspace only. Authentication tokens are matched by client workspace and user, meaning that one client is restricted from accessing another client’s data at the base level of our system.
• Kamsa does not share our client’s company data or employee compensation data with other client(s) or any outside parties. All of our client’s employee compensation data is aggregated and held strictly confidential before reporting it out (in an anonymized way) to our clients to leverage in our proprietary market compensation database.