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The Chapman Consulting Group Salary Survey – Japan, Korea and Taiwan

Over the past six months, The Chapman Consulting Group has collated the following salary data for in-country HR Leaders in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The objective of this report is to shine an additional ‘practical’ lens on the information published elsewhere on HR Leaders’ salaries. We would envision regional and business decision makers to use the results as part of their external benchmarking.

Sample Size

The sample size is large – we took this data from information that we have received over the last 6 months (August 2013 to January 2014) from over 600 HR Leaders in Japan, 400 in Korea and 300 in Taiwan). Moreover, it only comes from HR Leaders at multinational organisations, hence it already includes the language skills premium.

Number of In-Country Employees

The data is subdivided by how many employees are in a company. This distinction was made because the employee size tends to symbolise different types of HR leadership position:

  • Under 100 employees: The HR Leader tends to be a sole-contributor HR role with a high degree of hands-on operational responsibility;
  • 100-300 employees: Similar to ‘under 100 employees’, but with the support of a small team;
  • 300-750 employees: The HR Leader generally presides over a larger team of specialists, as well as multiple business units with their own HR Business Partners;
  • 750+ employees: Similar to 300-750 employees but on a larger scale.

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Complexity

The data is also subdivided into a ‘Degree of Complexity’ factor. ‘Complexity’ in this HR context stems from our knowledge of the company’s local and international structure, level of HR sophistication, and the extent to which HR works strategically with the business. Other contributing factors include the following elements:

  • Board membership status;
  • Existence of labour unions;
  • Complexity of matrix reporting structures;
  • Makeup of country leadership teams;
  • Requirement for pre- or post-Merger and Acquisition work.

There is no fixed overarching definition for how this was measured, as it is to a large extent subjective. In short, ‘we know it when we see it’!

Base Salary

We did not collect data on bonuses, because we found that ‘target’ bonuses do not correlate with the reality of what is being paid. When looking at what ‘actual’ bonuses were paid, we found it was misleading to quote figures made up of a mix of company practice and the performance of that particular HR individual. Hence we have used base salary as the basis for comparison.

Industrial Sectors

In terms of industry sector, we did generally see higher fixed salaries in the Investment Banking sector, and to some extent in other Financial Services sectors as well. We also noted significantly less correlation in this industry between the fixed salary of the HR Leader and the number of in-country employees, when compared with other sectors.

In all other industries, there were no overall distinguishing trends; however, we did notice that salaries in the High Tech, Healthcare and Consumer Goods industries tended to be at the top end of the scales listed. Conversely, salaries in the Media, Retail and Hospitality sectors tended towards the lower end. But there are too many ‘exceptions to the rule’ for this data to be of any practical use.

Qualifying Notes

  • The data does not cover HR Leaders on expat packages.
  • The data does not cover HR Leaders with Global, International, Regional or Sub-Regional responsibility, since the sample sizes of these HR professionals for multinational companies in these particular markets were too small.
  • We did not subdivide the data by company revenue, as we found a greater correlation between salary and employee number.
  • We did not take into account how Country HR Leadership was titled, since this has no discernable correlation with the nature of the role itself.
  • We did not include salary conversions from local currencies into USD, because there is a danger that by doing so we are making a statement on the comparable ‘value’ of in-country HR Leaders. Our view is that the currency conversion says more about the strength of local currencies, as opposed to providing a useful comparison of talent between markets.
  • In the interest of simplicity and cleanliness of data, we did not include P25, P50 and P75 percentile ranges. There were results that were outside the salary ranges indicated, but these handfuls were discounted as outliers, so as not to skew key accuracy of the data.

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