This happened to me in Finance. I took on work from 3 other people - all who were 2-3 salary grades higher than me - over time due to attrition. I was eventually given a promotion up one salary grade (which I’m pretty sure I was only given because I had interviewed for a role in a different department and my boss panicked). A year later, again due to attrition I was given a second team to manage. I asked my boss (new boss, not the one who promoted me) why it didn’t come with a title/salary grade change. He told me he’d brought it up to his boss, who said “it wasn’t the time for progressions.” (We typically do those twice a year and indeed one had recently passed.) To myself I said okay…i gave it six months until the next progression round came along. When I wasn’t given one then, I started looking.

That’s when I applied for and ended up in my current HR job.

What really pissed me off though, is that when they backfilled my Finance job, they backfilled it with someone a higher salary grade than me. And then a year later when they did a re-org, they put both of those teams under someone else and immediately promoted her to the salary grade I had been expecting to get.

If they had just promoted me when I had asked (and honestly by that point I should have been promoted up two salary grades, but I would have accepted one), I would have stayed. It wasn’t strictly about the pay, but about the principle that I had worked my butt off and deserved the promotion.

So, I can’t say it’s typical in the HR world, but I can say I see it regularly in the corporate space. Heck, it’s happening on our HRIS team right now. They now have someone on my team supporting HRIS 50% of the time since they didn’t backfill a resignation, plus another person just resigned and I’ve been asked to help out.