Set up Guidance

What is Guidance?

Guidance is durable context that applies to every question you ask Pave Agent: how your organization thinks about pay, which metrics you use, and what rules always hold. Set it once and you stop restating it in every conversation.

Guidance sits alongside Skills, and the two do different jobs:

• Guidance is always-on context about your organization.
• Skills are step by step instructions for one specific workflow, and Pave Agent pulls in the relevant one based on what you ask.

Both live in Context, which you open from the Pave Agent chat header.

How Guidance works

Guidance is a single free-text field. There are no fields to fill in and no required format. You write it however you like, and your company has one Guidance document that everyone with Pave Agent access shares.

A few things follow from that:

• Everyone with Pave Agent access at your company sees the same Guidance, and anyone with access can edit it.
• Saving overwrites what was there. There is no version history and no way to revert.
• Because it is one shared document, agree on changes before making them.

Edit your Guidance

1. Open Context from the Pave Agent chat header.
2. Go to the Guidance tab.
3. Select Edit.
4. Write or change your Guidance, then select Save. To abandon your changes, select Discard changes.

If you close Context using the X button while you have unsaved Guidance changes, you are asked to confirm first. Pressing Escape or clicking outside the panel closes it without asking, and unsaved changes are lost, so save before you navigate away.

What to put in it

Nothing here is required and there is no format to follow. What matters more than coverage is how you write it: Guidance works best when it reads like onboarding notes for a new analyst on their first day, so write rules rather than background. Prefer "benchmark against the technology cut" over "we tend to look at technology companies." Be explicit about what should always happen and what should never happen. The rules people forget to write down are usually the ones about what not to do.

Use the following as a checklist of what tends to be worth writing down.

Market positioning. Your target percentile and whether it differs by function or by pay element, how you define tech versus non-tech roles, your benchmarking approach and which data sources you triangulate, and your geo pay policy. If a lower pay zone is set as a percentage of a higher zone rather than benchmarked on its own, say so, or that zone reads as a gap against market.

Metrics and measurement. Whether you use compa ratio, range penetration, or both, where new hires and newly promoted employees should land in a range, and how employees should be distributed within a band.

Comp planning rules. Whether you use a merit matrix, when off-cycle changes are permitted, which populations are excluded from merit, whether promotion budget is separate, any hard caps on increases (for example, 10 percent for merit and 20 percent for promotions), and your equity refresh timing and basis.

Hiring and offers. Where offers should land in a band by default, how above-band exceptions are handled, and any role-specific offer rules.

Defaults and conventions. The assumptions Pave Agent would otherwise get wrong: the currency you want recommendations in, a non-standard annualization basis if your company does not use a standard working year, and whether to use on-target earnings rather than base if your ranges are built that way.

Other instructions. Anything Pave Agent should never do, and how you want answers framed.

Additional policy context. Anything else from your compensation philosophy that does not fit above.

Have Pave Agent draft it for you

If you are starting from nothing, ask Pave Agent to help.

Check that Pave's Skills are loaded first. Set up Guidance is one of Pave's built-in Skills, and those are not loaded for you. Open Context, go to the Skills tab, and look for Set up Guidance in the list. If it is not there, select Load Pave Skills. This is a one-time step for your company, and the control disappears once it is done.

Then ask Pave Agent to help you set up your Guidance. It uses the Set up Guidance Skill, which:

1. Checks whether you have already uploaded a compensation philosophy document.
2. Reviews what it can already see in your Pave configuration, so it does not ask you about things it can work out, and flags gaps it finds.
3. Interviews you about what it cannot determine.
4. Drafts a Guidance document from your answers.

The draft is copy and paste. Pave Agent cannot write into the Guidance field for you, so copy the draft it produces and paste it into the Guidance tab yourself.

If it flags a gap in your underlying data during this process, fix the data rather than writing around it in Guidance. Guidance can tell Pave Agent how to interpret your data. It cannot substitute for data that is not there.

Things to know

Guidance applies to everyone. It is one document per company, not a personal setting. Anything you write applies to your colleagues' questions too.

Corrections you make in a conversation are not Guidance. What Pave Agent picks up from talking to you is specific to you and does not carry to your teammates. If something should apply to everyone, put it in Guidance.

Guidance shapes interpretation, not access. It cannot give Pave Agent data it does not have. See the article on what data Pave Agent can see.