In a company which is post accelerator and has raised $1-2mm, without being an absurd success or abject failure, I value equity for employees using a valuation of 0.5-0.75x the cap on convertible debt if you were to issue the debt right now. I have no idea how to handle this at Series A or beyond; a bridge I will burn when I come to it. You may adjust this based on whether you view investor money as particularly cheap (which varies by segment), how long since you raised, etc. The main thing is it should be consistent across employees at a given time.

(So, e.g., a $10mm cap note company which has raised $2mm would treat each 1% of employee equity as $50-$75k. So giving up $25k in cash salary should get you, as a 4 year grant, 2% to 1.3% equity. That is in line with the 0.5-1% for a seed stage 5-7y experience strong individual contributor equity, which is a slightly low amount; generally I've seen 0.1-0.25% for 3-5y experience Series A hires, on say a $20-30mm valuation, which also is in line with this.)

The annoying thing is a company wants to discount equity to employees at 0.5-0.75x. Engineers often discount it to 0.1, especially people who have been burned in the past (90% of people in the first bubble, ex-Zynga people, etc. If you're negotiating with someone who irrationally discounts equity, just pay him more cash and pocket the difference).

A Google SSE or Staff Eng is about $200-225k on the market (total comp), a 3-5 year guy is more like 125-150k, and a very junior person is 75-100k. You can allocate that among perks, equity, bonus, %, and base in various ways.

There is basically no way to use just above-market salary to hire good people, but lack of market salary can get people to rule you out. I've worked at companies where ~everyone got $150k cash + strong equity (0.25-1%), and it ended up just being mercenary people who worked there and remained, due to other defects in corporate culture. (I've also worked in a 200-500k cash-comp-only environment, and the quality of people was inferior to any startup I've ever seen.)

You can probably get people to sacrifice 0-25% of total comp (and maybe up to 50% for short periods of time, like 3-6mo until financing). They are only willing to do that if they think it is "fair", which means they have good odds of doing well on the deal, and others in the company, particularly founders, make similar sacrifices. If a founder is paying himself $150k/yr, and is trying to negotiate a $225k Staff Engineer hire to take $50k cash + $50k equity, you'll probably only get the most self-sacrificing and useless person to join. If a founder is paying himself $30k and is trying to get a $225k SE to take $70k/yr until Series A (6mo), then $120k, plus $50k of equity, and some other perks ("not being at Google of 2012" seems like a serious perk for a lot of the people I've talked to), you'd have a shot.

The best way to allocate equity that I've seen was the 'allocate by cohort' strategy (I forget who proposed this...maybe hn user joshu? or suster or feld or someone). Basically all of your hires at seed stage get x%. All of your hires from Series A to Series B get x% also. But your first pool is split across 5 people, and your second pool is split across 25 people. It is way easier for me to understand the relative importance of the 5 people hired during seed stage vs. figuring out their time/risk weighted importance in a company all the way to IPO.