What role do job descriptions play in pay transparency?

As companies are making preparations for the EU Pay Transparency Directive, job descriptions will play a key role. 

The directive doesn’t explicitly mention job descriptions, but they are the building blocks which allow organisations to operationalise many of its requirements. 

For this reason, ensuring that you have standardisation and governance over your job descriptions is essential. 

This is not always the case though, with RoleMapper data showing that 60% of job descriptions are out of date and fail to reflect the skills required to do the job.

Job descriptions hold the information that can enable you to compare jobs of the same or similar value, to define the criteria for progression, and more. 

Job architecture & groupings

Job groupings form the first step in our new Roadmap to Prepare for EU Pay Transparency guide, as they provide the means to consolidate and compare jobs of equal value and to justify any differences in pay.

As job descriptions define the work and skills required to do the job, they form the foundations of any job architecture. Job descriptions are the data inputs that enable you to identify equality and similarity of work, skills and value and group jobs to enable comparison and analysis.

Job evaluation 

Under the directive, organisations must have pay structures in place based on job evaluation and classification systems that use ‘objective, gender-neutral criteria’.

What this means is that organisations need to have a robust, objective, and unbiased mechanism to value jobs. The EU Directive recommends using a job evaluation or job classification methodology that can systematically value roles based on objective criteria.

Job descriptions are generally the basis for any job evaluation and classification methodology. They provide the baseline information of the work, skills, and scope of the role to enable an assessment of the objective criteria and, ultimately, the value of the job.

Pay progression & inclusive recruitment criteria

Article 6 of the Directive states that employers ‘...shall make easily accessible to their workers the criteria that are used to determine workers’ pay progression.’

This means that employers need to be clear on why pay varies in the company, and they should be able to explain the criteria for pay progression and why current pay for one role differs from that of another. 

There is often a lot of bias and subjectivity associated with pay decisions. By requiring visibility of progression criteria, the directive is aiming to eliminate bias from compensation decisions.

Job descriptions are where you determine the skills requirements to articulate differential pay progression criteria from one job to another and the criteria to feed into inclusive recruitment practices.

Gender neutral job titling and language

Job descriptions form the baseline content for job postings. It is the job description that determines how inclusive and bias-free your postings will be.

In practice, you will need to review and revise job titles to eliminate gendered titles. So, ‘salesperson’ should be used instead of ‘salesman,’ for example. 

Job postings must also be examined for gender-coded languages which might make the job less attractive to either gender. Words like ‘decisive’, or ‘courage’ may send subtle links that companies are looking to attract male applicants.

Pay disclosure

Under the directive, Member States ‘...shall put in place measures to prohibit contractual terms that restrict workers from disclosing information about their pay.’

In practice, employees will know a lot more about their pay as a result of the directive. They will know how their own pay has been determined, and how that compares to other jobs. 

Employees will also have a right to discuss their pay with their colleagues. Without clear job descriptions and an understanding of why there are differences in compensation between jobs, this could be the cause of tension and misunderstandings. 

Employee requests & disputes

The job description is used to support pay inequality disputes. There have been several high-profile equality court cases where the job description has been used as a basis for debating inequality of pay, with retailer Next being one such case.

In addition to this, Article 19 states that the assessment of equal pay ‘...shall not be limited to workers who are employed at the same time as the worker concerned.’

This means it is important that historical information on the job is held, and an audit trail of changes is retained, as it may be necessary to use it for analysis and comparison purposes.