Over the last few years, Amsterdam’s scaleup ecosystem has thrived, thanks to solid digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and increased access to capital. Dutch scaleups have created 35,000 more jobs in the last three years, doubling their growth rate of the three years prior, according to Dealroom.
The combined value of Amsterdam’s scaleup ecosystem has grown from €10B in 2015 to €100B in 2020, driven by leaders like Adyen and TakeAway. Over the last couple of years, Amsterdam has consistently ranked as one of the top 3 tech hubs in continental Europe, competing with Berlin, Paris, and London.
In 2022, Amsterdam was listed as Europe’s 2nd most valuable tech hub (after London) by enterprise value, valued at €227B (including Adyen and TakeAway).
RocketX, an Amsterdam-based accelerator that incubates, builds, develops, and invests in technology & scale-ups, announced on Tuesday, September 20, that it has published its ‘Amsterdam Scaleup Salary Benchmark Report 2022.’
The report provides insight into salary developments in scaleups in Amsterdam and its surrounding areas.
Methodology
The report was compiled from data provided by Dutch scaleups in the greater Amsterdam Region, commonly known as ‘de Randstad.’ This region consists of Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, and Rotterdam.
The compilation is based on inputs from 62 high-growth companies with 20-150 employees, a turnover of €1M, and a survey among 2,416 talents at scaleups.
Short overview
The report shows between 2021 and 2022, the average salary across all job categories, and nearly all seniority levels, increased by an average of 4.6 per cent. The report also reveals that:
- Revenue positions have increased by 5.4 per cent
- Technology and product roles have increased by 3.3 per cent
- HR and Talent Acquisition by 7 per cent
RocketX also researched trends in bonuses, employee options, work environment, diversity, and international employees. The report reveals, among other things, that 56.7 per cent of scale-ups grant all employees stock options as part of their compensation to compete with large tech companies in the labour market.
Beer Zandt, Co-founder, and Head of Partnerships at RocketX, says: “In our partnership with scale-ups and talent in Europe, we are regularly asked whether we can benchmark salaries to understand the right rewards for positions. We believe in the power of transparency for both employers and employees. Especially In the current turbulent labour market, it is important to keep abreast of the impact of market conditions on salaries.”
“In 2021, we launched the first edition of the Amsterdam Scaleup Benchmark Report that was well received by both scale-ups and talent”, continues Beer Zandt. “We also have reports launched for Berlin and Munich. In addition, the now published second Dutch edition offers the possibility to compare the salary development in the Amsterdam region with that in 2021 and other major European tech hubs.”
Here’s a glimpse at the report across domains and contains the definitions of roles and change in salaries.
Revenue
According to RocketX’s definition, “The Revenue domain is a cluster of functions that predominantly contributes to revenue generation within scale-ups.”
Marketing
The marketing department aims to position and promote the brand to prospective customers to drive demand and generate leads. Further, the marketing department is divided into:
Growth Marketer: A Growth Marketer is responsible for finding and managing the right channels to reach customers and continuously optimise traffic, engagement, and conversion.
Content Marketer: A Content Marketer is responsible for developing the content strategy based on the defined ideal customer profile and target persona within the decision-making unit.
Product Marketer: The Product Marketer is responsible for developing effective marketing strategies to promote products and their features to an organisation’s target audience.
Note: Since Product Marketer roles were not yet included in the 2021 version, a comparison is not applicable between 2021 and 2022.
Visual Design: A Visual Designer is responsible for bringing a brand’s vision to life.
Sales & Business Development
The sales department is dedicated to selling a business’s product or service to customers.
Sales Development Rep: Depending on the business and distribution model, SDRs are responsible for following up on marketing qualified leads and performing outbound sales prospecting.
Account executive: The Account Executive is responsible for the mid-to-bottom-of-funnel sales process, meaning they should have a discovery call, give the prospect a product demo, deliver the proposal, negotiate, and eventually close the deal.
Customer Success: The customer success team ensures that customers achieve success by using the product or service to increase retention and identify up-and-cross-sell opportunities.
Revenue Operations (RevOps): RevOps is a B2B function that focuses on the Revenue domain to help teams make decisions that grow the business.
Product & Technology
According to RocketX’s definition, “The Product & Technology domain is a cluster of functions that focuses on the development of a company’s product and/or technological offering.”
Product
The product arm of a business is responsible for product planning and execution throughout the product life cycle. The product category is divided into:
Product Manager: The Product Manager is responsible for the product development cycle.
UI/UX designer: The UI/UX designer’s job is to create user-friendly interfaces that enable customers to navigate a business’ digital products and understand how to use them.
Solutions Engineer: A Solution Engineer’s job is to bridge the commercial aspect and technical requirements of a client or prospect.
Note: Since Solution Engineer roles were not yet included, a comparison is not applicable.
Technology
The technology or engineering department builds and maintains the software and technical infrastructure and takes care of the technical systems overall.
Front-End developer: A Front-End Developer ensures that visitors to a company’s website have a pleasant experience and can easily interact with the product.
Back-End Developer: Back-End Developers build and maintain the technology that powers the application’s back-end or infrastructure.
Full-Stack Developer: They manage the back-end and front-end development of the software or (web) application.
DevOps: DevOps looks to speed up and automate aspects of a business’ processes regarding developing, testing, and releasing software and constant updates.
Data Scientist: A Data Scientist extracts, analyses, and interprets masses of data from various sources.
Data Engineer: Data Engineers are responsible for finding trends in data sets and developing algorithms to help make sure that raw data is more beneficial to a business.
Operations
According to RockstartX’s definition, “The Operations department is a cluster of functions that makes sure the business is running smoothly and includes HR, Finance, Legal & Business Operations.”
HR Manager: The Human Resources (HR) department manages the employee lifecycle, from recruitment to retirement.
Talent Business Partner (TBP): TBPs or Recruiters are responsible for sourcing and screening relevant candidates while managing the candidate interview experience.
Legal Counsel: Legal Counsel is responsible for managing legal risks and challenges, drafting and reviewing contracts, templates, and frameworks, advising management on strategic questions from a legal point of view, and assisting the founders during investment rounds.
Finance: The finance department oversees all accounting, bookkeeping, and financial affairs.
Business Operations: Business Operations Managers work cross-departmentally in organisations to streamline and organise processes.
Department Heads Domain
Besides individual contributor roles, RocketX also benchmarked the salaries for the heads of the departments, including the following roles:
01
Job board for modern workforce: How Remote Talent helps jobseekers find truly remote, distributed work