Another way to approach this problem is to not anchor salaries based on previous salary. I've worked at a company where we hired obviously talented people with

Another way to approach this problem is to not anchor salaries based on previous salary. I've worked at a company where we hired obviously talented people with little experience. We hired them on as jr devs, with commensurate salaries, but within a year their salaries had increased to their productivity levels (30-40%). I've seen too many people with low salaries get "exceptional" raises of 5% when everyone in the company gets 3%. So you have an employee who works his way out of tech support into dev admin but he's the bottom of a very large band. There is no hope for that person to get to salary parity when mountains have to be moved to go from 3% to 5%.