Featured Projects –
Russell and Bromley

Russell & Bromley – Pay Benchmarking

Russell & Bromley are a leading British footwear and handbag retailer that operate 43 stores and two concessions in the UK. Synonymous with expert craftsmanship and fashion-led design, they are a growing business looking to review their current position of remuneration packages specifically within the South London retail employment market for Head Office roles. Russell & Bromley consider themselves to be the market leader in terms of employee benefits, so our case study looks at the work carried out by the Cogito People Insights team to obtain a more detailed understanding of its offering and how it compares with the competition.

The Challenge

Russell & Bromley recognised that they needed to review their pay to help with benchmarking and future recruitment. While they have already done this internally, they wanted a partner to provide impartial and comparable external data.

They enlisted the help of Cogito People Insights to increase their confidence in what they had already discovered, ensuring that they would be competitive within the market; this would ultimately reduce the likelihood of a current employee being tempted away by a competitor offering a higher salary or a potential candidate rejecting the job due to poor pay.

Through a combination of desk-based and telephone research methods, Cogito People Insights sought to deliver a comprehensive research project for Russell & Bromley concerning the salaries, benefits, and other elements of remuneration across the specified target roles and location.

Our Solution

Russell & Bromley were keen to understand professionals’ salaries within other businesses, so we started our research with 107 in-depth telephone calls to potential candidates whose profiles closely matched the skills required for job roles they offer. Through this research, we obtained valuable information about their current working situation (salary, bonuses, employee benefits, pensions, staff discounts, flexible working) and their expectations of taking on a different role. We complemented this with desk-based research from payroll providers and open-source data repositories.

Our research identified the following key findings in addition to generating benchmarks for each role by quartile.

• The percentage of potential candidates who received an annual bonus and the level of importance of the bonus to these candidates.
• How many people receive healthcare as a benefit and what coverage.
• How important pensions are to candidates when considering a new role.
• Candidate preferences for hybrid working.

Subsequently, all data was presented to Russell & Bromley on interactive dashboards & PDF reports.