We had an employee leave this week due to not being paid market rate for his position (a formal request for a pay raise was denied). His existing salary (with bonus included) was $25K beneath the new hire ceiling pay (minus bonus) for the same position.
Words cannot express my disappointment and frustration with HR and upper management. Now we not only have to hire someone with no prior knowledge of the convoluted proprietary software we run but we will likely end up paying him/her what this employee was asking for in the first place (not including all associated hiring costs/fees)
I wish we would focus more on paying people what the market rate is instead of flat out shutting down pay raises on account of being "too much of a pay jump". This doesn't even take into account the >10% inflation that has occurred the past two years.