Frequently Asked Questions

Kamsa is a total compensation software built to manage employee compensation. It includes: global market compensation data, and helps you with job leveling, building compensation ranges (cash and equity), as well as run your compensation reviews.

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 proprietary market compensation data consists of actual employee data from our clients (anonymized, of course). 

Kamsa has helped over 500 global companies with their compensation needs.

Kamsa’s market data is updated quarterly and consists of:

• 80+ global data cuts
• 2,000+ jobs

Companies are typically the tech industry and:

• Employee Size: <1,000 employees
• Stages: Series A to Series E 

Market data is refreshed every quarter to keep it real-time.

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.

We are actively building HRIS integration capabilities 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!

Any information provided to us will be held encrypted and with strict confidence. We are GDPR compliant, our privacy statement can be found here. For more information, see the question entitled “What has been done to prevent data breaches?”

• 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.

We take security very seriously. Below are examples of how we proactively prevent data breaches:

• Twice a year (at a minimum), a third party security company performs a vulnerability assessment on the Kamsa platform.
• Once a year (at a minimum) a third party security company performs penetration testing on the Kamsa platform.
• Kamsa has completed a SOC 2 Type I audit and is currently undergoing a SOC 2 Type II audit both performed by an accredited CPA firm.
• Measures have been put in place to prevent brute force attacks on Kamsa
• Data is stored encrypted behind enterprise level firewalls
• Access to sensitive data has been limited to only those required to have it, and still it is stored securely.
• VPN is used for all work done with sensitive data to prevent data interception.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enforced for the most sensitive data areas of Kamsa
• Kamsa also enforces clients’ browser to only communicate via secure connections.
• Any 3rd party tool, company or vendor that provides services to Kamsa are all required to be GDPR compliant, and enforce the same or better security measures.