# New ways to forecast, benchmark, and optimize your comp strategy

Authors:

Ann Hodge, Josh Steinfeld

Read time:

1 minute

Published date:

July 17, 2025

Save multiple hiring plans, access new Canadian and capital-raised benchmarks, and get clearer guidance on board and advisor equity.

## **Benchmarks for board members and advisors**

This quarter, we released a net new dataset: equity benchmarks for board members and advisors by valuation. For startups bringing on advisors for the first time—or growth-stage companies calibrating board grants—this fills a critical gap in compensation planning.

## **New roles and more tailored benchmarks**

We’ve expanded our benchmark dataset to help you make more competitive offers. Capital-raised benchmarks allow you to filter salary and equity ranges based on funding raised, not just valuation or headcount. New geographic adjustments for Canadian cities—Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal—provide localized accuracy for compensation planning. And finally, we’ve added compensation data for five new roles: Sales Operations, HR Operations, Demand Generation, Business Intelligence & Analytics, and Onboarding & Implementations.

## **Smarter, more flexible headcount planning**

With updates to the hiring planner in the Manage Employees hub, you can build, save, and manage multiple hiring plans across departments and timelines. Connect these plans to your equity pool forecast report to view the impact in real time, ensuring People, Finance, and Talent teams stay on the same page.

Author: [Ann Hodge](https://fund-forecasting@carta.com/author/ann-hodge/)

Ann Hodge is a content strategist focused on early-stage and growth startups, taxes, and equity compensation. Before joining Carta, Ann worked at NerdWallet on the content strategy team.

Author: [Josh Steinfeld](https://fund-forecasting@carta.com/author/josh-steinfeld/)

Josh Steinfeld leads product strategy for Carta Total Compensation. Josh has been a compensation professional for the last 20 years, most recently leading compensation at Google for YouTube and Google’s corporate functions.