Frank van der Leeden, VP of Total Rewards at Celonis, the fast-growing data processing company, tells Saehena Hong how new ways of thinking about compensation and benefits together with the integration of AI tools are underpinning Rewards’ role as a key strategic lever of business growth, driving both beneficial organisational behaviours and business outcomes.
Frank van der Leeden (FL): I started my career in HR as a generalist with a strong operational focus, believing the path forward was to become a CHRO. I knew that my strengths lay in working with data and numbers and saw how quantitative insight could strongly influence executive decision‑making. In my first HRBP role with Booking.com, the company was scaping rapidly from around 4,000 employees to over 17,000 employees. One of the key challenges was building scalable structures to manage growth and compensation effectively. As there was no established approach, I took on that challenge, which marked my entry into the world of compensation and Total Rewards.
After briefly exploring a more traditional corporate environment at a European bank (ING), I moved into FinTech (Adyen), where I built the reward function from the ground up, balancing speed and innovation with strict regulatory requirements. Most recently, I joined Celonis, a privately held company creating an entirely new category in process intelligence, representing a new and exciting chapter in my Total Rewards career.
FL: I think Total Rewards is much more than just compensation and benefits. It really defines the spirit of a company and has a direct impact on culture.
From a compensation perspective, you can actively steer behaviour. For example, if you become more aggressive on variable pay, you create a stronger pay-for-performance culture. You’re giving people financial buy-in and real skin in the game. At Celonis, everyone from entry-level roles through to the C-suite receives equity. That sense of ownership means that when the business needs to shift direction, people move with it. Not just because of financial incentives, but because they feel like owners.
On the benefits side, you can focus on attracting and retaining specific talent segments. For instance, we’ve made a deliberate effort to offer top-of-market parental leave. We also offer what we call an “education kicker”, where employees who expand their family through birth or adoption receive an equity grant for their child. The idea is that by the time the child turns 18, it becomes something meaningful, potentially supporting their education.
This approach was very much driven by a business need. We saw higher attrition among employees who were starting families. They loved the company and the work, but felt they couldn’t balance it with life outside work. So we asked ourselves: how do we solve this in a more creative way, beyond simply offering more time off?
That’s where Total Rewards can really add value: thinking beyond traditional policies and even beyond the individual employee. The impact has been clear. We’ve seen very high return rates after parental leave, and overall retention has improved. Even after extended time away, employees are coming back and staying longer, which ultimately supports both our culture and long-term growth.
FL: One example I implemented at a previous employer, Adyen, was a very deliberate rethink of how benefits were structured. Instead of offering a long list of small perks like insurance benefits, pensions, gym memberships, subscriptions, bike schemes, and so on, we decided to simplify everything. First, we got you covered for worst case scenarios such as life, death, disability and saving for later retirement through pension. Beyond that, we introduced one single, flexible benefit, which we called Adyen+.
It was essentially a significant monthly cash allowance that all employees receive. It meant that employees could spend it entirely as they wished. If someone wanted to put the full amount into their pension, they could. If they wanted to buy a bike, spend it on childcare or diapers, cover daycare costs, or use it for travel, that was completely up to them. The idea was to recognise that people’s lives look very different depending on their stage, priorities, and personal circumstances.
Then employees started sharing their stories on how they were using it – whether it was supporting a growing family, investing in long-term security, or simply enjoying life a bit more. It reinforced trust and autonomy, and it supported the kind of culture we wanted to build. Another advantage to our Reward team was simplicity! Because we were able to remove small, fragmented benefit offerings, we saved a lot of time.
FL: Keep things extremely simple. My decks have minimal slides, minimal words. The real power is in clarity and focus. A CEO I once worked with used to ask, “What’s the Easter egg in the deck?” What he meant was: what is the one thing I absolutely need to know so I don’t get caught off guard? Point me through the data and show me where I should focus. That lesson has stayed with me, whether I’m working with an executive team or a supervisory board, in a public or private company.
One of my most challenging moments came at a previous heavily regulated, publicly listed company. Every four years we had to renew the remuneration policy, and by that point the company had grown from an underdog into a truly global player. We needed a major overhaul of the policy and approval at the Annual General Meeting. It was my first time working with proxy advisors like ISS and Glass Lewis, and I had to engage directly with the top ten shareholders. Instead of familiar boardroom discussions, I suddenly found myself explaining complex changes to investors for whom I was just one small dot on their radar. We managed to pull it off by sticking to the same principles: very clear data, strong rationale, and simple, pragmatic messaging. I worked closely with the chair of the remuneration committee, and together we guided stakeholders through why the changes were necessary.
Now I am very much involved in M&A at Celonis. When we grow through acquisitions, the majority of costs and benefit liabilities are always within Total Rewards. So naturally I work with the top line to make decisions on how equity is transferred, how we define performance after acquisition, and what culture we want to see through the new reward blueprint. At this level, the more detail you add, the more confusion you add. So I keep things very slim for my stakeholders.
FL: As we fight for AI talent, Total Rewards become more important than ever. Celonis’ employees are often targeted by our competitors because we have top class AI talent. That creates a new question for companies: how do you ensure your value proposition to employees stays relevant? Because every company can offer more money, there’s always someone who will pay more. But what will actually make people stay? It’s about going beyond cash and thinking more creatively and comprehensively. Whether that’s unique benefits, equity programmes, or how people feel connected to the company, that will define whether you can attract and retain top talent. So yes, AI is the headline trend, but the real opportunity is how you evolve your employee value proposition in response to it.
Also, the sweet spot for hiring is AI-native associates in Reward. A junior or entry-level hire is often more AI-native than I would ever be so the way they think and operate is groundbreaking. I am really excited to see how we can put together the experience we have and the new generation’s out-of-the-box way of thinking.
FL: At Celonis, we’ve started to actively apply AI to support Reward work, across compensation and benefits. That includes things like benchmarking, providing compensation advice for hiring, internal transfers, and promotions. We’re still in the early days, but I do think this will be quite disruptive and will change a lot of the work we traditionally do.
We’re also very focused on adoption within the team. It’s important that people take the time to understand the tools, not be afraid of them, and also not blindly trust them. The outputs are only as good as the data and parameters behind them, which, in our case, are based on real-time market data and our pay strategy. So if you trusted the inputs before, there’s no reason not to trust the outputs now. But you still need to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.
Another aspect of AI is that it makes the world feel much smaller, enabling a far more borderless way of working and organising teams. For example, I’m based in Amsterdam, our CHRO sits in Munich, and my peer leading HR business partnering and learning is based in New York -this kind of distributed setup is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Hiring also becomes truly global, as you’re no longer constrained by geography when looking for the best talent. AI is a big enabler of this shift, acting as a layer across the stack, making collaboration, decision-making, and execution much more seamless across locations. As a result, organisations are increasingly being built in a borderless way, with teams collaborating across time zones in a much more connected, always-on environment.
If you would like to take part in the Total Reward discussion series, get in touch and let’s explore a conversation from your perspective.
