Would leading a team and being hands-on creating innovative NLP solutions to complex problems excite you?
Join us as we build cutting-edge NLP systems that will transform the future of work!
About us
In a world where organisations are facing significant skills challenges, increasing compliance requirements and continuous organisational transformation, current approaches to managing jobs and job data are no longer fit for purpose.
RoleMapper is an AI-powered job description management solution that enables organisations to create, manage and future-proof job architectures and job descriptions. Built with inclusion and diversity at the core – our big vision is that our platform helps organisations build inclusive workplaces and transforms the world of work.
In 3 years, we have built a portfolio of global big brand customers across the UK and US, have recently received significant VC funding and are now embarking on the next chapter of our growth journey.
If you love working in an inclusive, collaborative, team-first culture and are passionate about helping customers solve some of the biggest workforce challenges, then RoleMapper is the place to be!
As our NLP Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading a greenfield project that aims to develop innovative SOTA natural language processing models and applications.
You will play an active hands-on role, building and refining the NLP algorithms and infrastructure of our AI-powered job management platform. Building our Machine Learning/NLP capability, you will apply SOTA NLP techniques to solve complex problems while collaborating with cross-functional teams.
You will inspire, manage and mentor our small but growing ML team building a culture of innovation, continuous improvement and performance.
Responsibilities:
To be successful working with us you will be “Start-up ready”, by this we mean you: are naturally proactive, default to action; have a positive attitude to change; have a continuous improvement mindset; are flexible, always happy to go beyond your brief; enjoy working at pace; are comfortable when not everything is clearly defined!
And finally, you will really resonate with our values:
While our ‘official’ registered office is in Exeter, we all work remotely across different locations. We have regular team working-together days in both Exeter, Wokingham and London, so you would need to live/work somewhere reasonably accessible to one or more of these locations. If you prefer working in an office, we offer flexible memberships to regional workspaces.
Flexible Working
We recognize that everyone is different and that the way in which people want to work and deliver at their best is different for everyone too. In this role, we can offer the following flexible working patterns:
Competitive salary to be discussed.
Would creating innovative NLP solutions to solve complex problems excite you?
Join us as we build cutting-edge NLP systems that will transform the future of work!
About us
In a world where organisations are facing significant skills challenges, increasing compliance requirements and continuous organisational transformation, current approaches to managing jobs and job data are no longer fit for purpose.
RoleMapper is an AI-powered job description management solution that enables organisations to create, manage and future-proof job architectures and job descriptions. Built with inclusion and diversity at the core – our big vision is that our platform helps organisations build inclusive workplaces and transforms the world of work.
In 3 years, we have built a portfolio of global big brand customers across the UK and US, have recently received significant VC funding and are now embarking on the next chapter of our growth journey.
If you love working in an inclusive, collaborative, team-first culture and are passionate about helping customers solve some of the biggest workforce challenges, then RoleMapper is the place to be!
About the Role:
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (NLP), you will be contributing to an exciting new development project for new NLP capabilities across Role Mapper. You will apply SOTA NLP techniques to solve complex problems while collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Responsibilities:
Requirements:
To be successful working with us you will be “Start-up ready”, by this we mean you: are naturally proactive, default to action; have a positive attitude to change; have a continuous improvement mindset; are flexible, always happy to go beyond your brief; enjoy working at pace; are comfortable when not everything is clearly defined!
And finally, you will really resonate with our values:
Location
While our ‘official’ registered office is in Exeter, we all work remotely across different locations. We have regular team working-together days in both Exeter, Wokingham and London, so you would need to live/work somewhere reasonably accessible to one or more of these locations. If you prefer working in an office, we offer flexible memberships to regional workspaces.
Flexible Working
We recognize that everyone is different and that the way in which people want to work and deliver at their best is different for everyone too. In this role, we can offer the following flexible working patterns:
Salary
Competitive salary to be discussed.
Would creating innovative NLP solutions to solve complex problems excite you?
Join us as we build cutting-edge NLP systems that will transform the future of work!
About us
In a world where organisations are facing significant skills challenges, increasing compliance requirements and continuous organisational transformation, current approaches to managing jobs and job data are no longer fit for purpose.
RoleMapper is an AI-powered job description management solution that enables organisations to create, manage and future-proof job architectures and job descriptions. Built with inclusion and diversity at the core – our big vision is that our platform helps organisations build inclusive workplaces and transforms the world of work.
In 3 years, we have built a portfolio of global big brand customers across the UK and US, have recently received significant VC funding and are now embarking on the next chapter of our growth journey.
If you love working in an inclusive, collaborative, team-first culture and are passionate about helping customers solve some of the biggest workforce challenges, then RoleMapper is the place to be!
About the Role:
As a Junior Data Scientist (NLP), you will collaborate with a team on an innovative NLP research project. This includes assisting in the collection, cleaning, and analysis of data, implementing machine learning models, and translating complex findings into actionable insights. The position aims to provide a valuable contribution to the project while gaining knowledge and experience in the field of NLP.
Responsibilities:
Requirements:
To be successful working with us you will be “Start-up ready”, by this we mean you: are naturally proactive, default to action; have a positive attitude to change; have a continuous improvement mindset; are flexible, always happy to go beyond your brief; enjoy working at pace; are comfortable when not everything is clearly defined!
And finally, you will really resonate with our values:
Location
While our ‘official’ registered office is in Exeter, we all work remotely across different locations. We have regular team working-together days in both Exeter, Wokingham and London, so you would need to live/work somewhere reasonably accessible to one or more of these locations. If you prefer working in an office, we offer flexible memberships to regional workspaces.
Flexible Working
We recognize that everyone is different and that the way in which people want to work and deliver at their best is different for everyone too. In this role, we can offer the following flexible working patterns:
Salary
Competitive salary to be discussed.
Many local authorities are looking to transform how jobs are created, structured and governed. We explore the impact it can have on an organisation.
Jobs sit at the heart of delivering the changes required to support improvements in customer experience. How they are designed is critical to harnessing talent and skills across organisations and systems, ensuring inclusion, accessing talent, developing people and planning for the future.
The way jobs are currently organised and managed across many local authorities is a blocker to change. So much so, that, according to EY, “governments won’t be able to provide a 21st century citizen experience and better citizen outcomes with 20th century skills and working practices”.
Across many local authorities, the current process for creating, organising and governing jobs is manual, inefficient, inaccurate, resource-intensive and poor quality, which is why the need for job transformation is so critical for delivering a 21st century service.
For all local authorities, embarking on a job transformation project of whatever size can bring many benefits.
HR Systems & Processes
HCM systems require accurate job structures and job titles in place before implementation. The mistake many organisations make is simply loading in what exists already, which is likely to be outdated, rigid, and not fit for purpose. If jobs are not organised and up to date, this will hinder the value organisations can get from their technology investment.
Recruitment
For most HCM platforms, the job structure powers the recruitment workflow. If there isn’t a clear structure in place for jobs, and a central repository for job descriptions, HR, Hiring Managers and Recruiters can waste a significant amount of time writing duplicate content or using out-of-date job descriptions that don’t accurately reflect the role.
Compensation & Benefits
One of the main uses of a job framework or job architecture is to provide a framework for managing pay and reward. A job levelling process can be used to assess the relative value of jobs in the organisation and to put in place compensation parameters for each job level. This helps ensure a consistent approach across job functions and helps with pay equity reporting and analysis.
Legal and Compliance Reporting
With increasing pay equity legislation being introduced, along with the requirement to report on equitable pay practices, an accurate job framework is fast becoming a critical tool for local authorities to implement, monitor and govern pay equity strategies. With a job structure in place, pay equity analysis is made significantly easier, removing the management discretion around jobs and pay.
Inclusion and Flexible Working
How jobs are described in a job description can have a significant impact on the diversity of talent we can attract, recruit, retain and progress. If job descriptions are thrown together and then reused repeatedly, they are likely to reduce the diversity of applicants. In contrast, a well written job description with a focus on inclusion and the essential skills needed for the role, can greatly increase the diversity of candidates who apply for that role.
In our guide, Six Steps to Inclusive Job Descriptions, we describe the impact on diversity and inclusion.
Objectives & Performance Management
Having accurate, up-to-date job content is critical to objective setting and performance management. When this is working well, job content flows seamlessly from the recruitment process to the performance management process. If job content isn’t accurate, and doesn’t reflect the realities of a role, this can lead to employee attrition.
Research has shown a direct link between accurate job descriptions and attrition, with 43% of employees who leave within 90 days stating that their reason for leaving is that their day-to- day role wasn’t what they expected.
Learning & Development
Many organisations are moving to a skills-based approach and redesigning their operating
models and strategies to have skills at their core. This enables them to become more agile, to have higher levels of employee engagement, to encourage innovation and to show faster rates of growth.
Career Paths & Succession Planning
A clear, streamlined job structure helps an organisation map out possible career paths and communicate these to employees, so they can be informed about any training and development opportunities and see possible routes up and around the organisation.
Employees will have clear visibility of roles across the organisation and can identify possible roles in different teams and departments rather than simply focusing on movement within their current team.
Workforce Planning & Analytics
Planning your workforce around the skills that are needed now and in the future is a critical task that all local authorities need to undertake.
EY suggests seven steps for a public sector focussed workforce planning strategy, to identify the skills that an organisation requires and to plan a workforce around these:
disruption curves,” and continually recast existing roles and create new ones.
All of these steps are made easier by having a robust, future-focused job titling framework and job structure.
Organisational Change
Traditional ways of working have been replaced, digital transformation is happening across the public and private sector. Those using public services have very different expectations about how they access services now, compared to five or ten years ago.
These changes can make it difficult for local authorities to keep their job content up to date and reflecting the realities of the jobs that people are actually undertaking. However, digitising and centralising job content makes this process much easier. Changes can be made quickly and easily to the job content if demands change or an update to multiple job roles is required.
Where to start
It can be difficult to know where to start with a job transformation. When faced with a chaotic picture of multiple job titles across various business areas and regions, the response can be to put this task into the “too hard” box and delay it for another year, in the hope it sorts itself out. However, this can create issues, open organisations vulnerable to compliance risk or slow down strategic people initiatives.
As a starting point for any organisation, technology can fast-track the harmonisation of your organisation’s job titles, reducing the process from years or months to just weeks, giving you the scope to start transforming jobs across your council or local authority.
Our new guide, "The Strategic Importance of Jobs" explores why jobs are more than just tasks; they are critical components of strategic planning and organisational success.
We focus in on the following key points:
However, this approach can create issues, open organisations up to compliance risk, not to mention slow down strategic people initiatives.
RoleMapper’s Guide to Job Architecture offers practical insights and recommendations for HR professionals to design and maintain an effective organisational architecture.
You will learn:
RoleMapper eliminates the cost and time burden on Reward and HR teams. Our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing can transform your existing job titles and/or job data into a robust, future-focused job architecture and job titling framework.
Our team of experts work with you to design an AI-enabled solution or service that best suits your business requirements, giving you an accurate and fit-for-purpose representation of your organisation for strategic business and people initiatives.
For many organisations, getting their job architecture and job catalogue ‘house’ in order is a manual, slow and expensive process. The same applies to creating inclusive, compliant and de-biased job descriptions.
However, the speed at which hiring strategies are changing, and with legislation increasing around pay transparency and pay equity, organisations are at risk of falling behind, not to mention non-compliance, due to outdated job structures and job descriptions.
Using proprietary AI, with input from our team of experts, RoleMapper’s new services aim to rapidly reduce the cost and time it takes to consolidate and update your job architecture and job catalogue, as well as create best-in-class job postings that are fully inclusive, compliant and fit-for-purpose.
RoleMapper Founder and CEO, Sara Hill says: "Our Harmonisation, Transformation and Optimisation Services are simple and straightforward. You give us your job data as it is and we’ll give you a simplified, centralised, job architecture and job catalogue. Or, if you’re focused purely on job descriptions, fully compliant and de-biased job postings."
Continues Hill: "We’ve had repeated requests from customers to use RoleMapper to help fast track their job architecture and job catalogue clean-up and harmonisation projects. We’ve listened to the market and we’ve responded with the launch of our job Harmonisation, Transformation and Optimisation services.
We’ve seen so many strategic business or people initiatives fall at the first hurdle, mainly due to a lack of accuracy of data or the poor health of their job architecture and job descriptions. Why? Because typical manual processes are time-consuming and prone to error. Our service aims to completely remove those hurdles."
Increasing pay equity and pay transparency legislation, as well as changing requirements for reporting on equitable pay practices, prove that, now, more than ever, job architecture is fast-becoming the most critical tool for organisations to implement, monitor and govern pay equity strategies.
A job architecture provides a framework for defining and aligning jobs within your organisation based on the type of work performed.
In its simplest form, it provides you with a mechanism to consolidate all your job titles into a consistent framework that provides clarity and transparency on career levels and pay.
Jobs (job titles) that have common features are consolidated into job groups, sometimes called job families, or where more sophisticated management of skills and careers is in place, they might be called guilds or professional groups.
As these groups are created, each will contain a number of job titles and levels reflecting different job outputs, skills, knowledge and experience. This structure then provides the foundation for job levelling and salary structures and other equitable compensation programmes based on job value.
Pay equity is the concept of compensating employees who have similar job functions with comparably equal pay, regardless of factors such as their gender, race, and ethnicity.
Pay equity is not only essential from a legal compliance perspective, but also helps manage budgets (ensuring no-one is overpaid), attract and retain employees and supports organisations in fulfilling their D, E, and I strategy. There is also increasing pressure from external stakeholders, such as investors and regulators, to make sure that pay equity is being analysed, along with plans in place to address any issues.
There has been some debate around how rigid your job architecture needs to be. Not having one can lead to significant challenges around pay inequities and compliance complexity
As Tom McMullen, Total Rewards Expert, Korn Ferry, stated in a recent Pay Equity panel; ‘a wobbly job foundation is the enemy of pay equity management’.
In many organisations, it is frequently the case that job titles are a mess, job levels are all over the place and there are inconsistencies in salary ranges across roles, business areas and regions. As a result, most organisations see a lot of management discretion around jobs and pay - decentralised governance, inconsistencies, grandfathering old structures – resulting in job title chaos and a very weak foundation.
Payscale found that over 40% of companies do not have an organised pay structure that is aligned to job ranges, but it is important to remember that your organisation is responsible for all existing pay disparities, even if they are unknown.
The absence of a solid job foundation or a clearly defined job and pay structure, combined with frequent management discretion in job creation and pay allocation, can make dealing with possible pay inequity much more difficult and can expose organisations to risk around non-compliance.
As organisations start to focus on pay equity, they are looking at their job architecture to support this. Many high-performing organisations are trying to get a better understanding of how jobs are placed within the organisation and mapping comparability of positions and titles.
A job architecture helps organisations consider and justify the relative importance and impact of job roles on the organisation. Roles are organised in the structure according to the nature of the work and skills required. This, in turn, influences the seniority and compensation level for the role.
With new business models requiring greater workplace flexibility, there has been some debate around how rigid your job architecture needs to be. However, not having one can lead to significant challenges around pay inequities and compliance complexity.
Leading employers are finding that, even if it’s just creating consistent titles or mapping levels to job titles, a basic job architecture sets the foundation for pay strategies, the pricing of jobs, salary decisions, and equitable pay practices.
With a job structure in place, pay equity analysis is made significantly easier - it is easier to look across the organisation and compare different roles to each other to see if there are any pay disparities. These can then be examined further, and actions taken to address any areas of concern.
With a job framework in place, organisations have a structure to share with leaders, managers, and employees that provides clarity on pay decisions and career levels. The job architecture gives more structure to decision-making around promotions and any associated salary rises. It removes the management discretion around jobs and pay and the resulting chaos that ensues.
Our key takeaways…
If you are getting pressure from your board to do something about pay equity, there are two questions to ask yourself:
How firm is your job architecture and job levelling foundation?
If it’s not in a good place then this is where you need to start. Focus on getting your jobs appropriately grouped, by titles and by level, then it becomes a lot easier to do your pay equity assessment after this initial work.
If your job architecture is in a good place, what mechanism do you have in place to govern this?
Proactive organisations are putting in place regular reviews to make sure their job framework and job families are still fit for purpose. This is particularly important with the unprecedented pace of change that organisations are now experiencing. McKinsey found that most organisations undertake a restructure on average every 3 years. Couple this with the day-to-day changes to how roles are executed, and the need for new jobs to be created in line with changing needs, job family structures will never and shouldn't ever remain static.
Utilise software to create a job architecture and help ensure pay equity
Many organisations are using technologies like RoleMapper to fast-track the process of job architecture creation and help analyse and maintain pay equity.
In December 2022, EU negotiators reached an agreement on a directive to make salaries more transparent. The new rules will come into force twenty days after their publication in the EU Official Journal, and then member states will have three years to transpose these pay transparency requirements in their national law.
Following Brexit, the Directive will not apply in the UK. However, UK employers with European operations may want to ensure consistency of practice across their business.
The main aim of the directive is to narrow the gender pay gap across the EU, where currently women earn on average 13% less than men per hour. There is, however, considerable variation between EU countries ranging from a gender pay gap of:
Less than 5%:
More than 18%:
In the UK, the gap among full-time employees increased to 8.3% in 2022, up from 7.7% in 2021. Although, this is still below the gap of 9% reported in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic.
When thinking about gender pay gaps, it is also important to consider the impact a salary pay gap can have on other aspects of overall compensation, such as pension provision. The EU currently has a gender pension gap of 30% between men and women.
The challenge for most organisations is not just how to keep up with the changes, but mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance globally
Pay transparency for job seekers
Employers will be required to provide information to job seekers about the initial pay level or the pay range of the role they are applying for. This could either be set out in the job advert, or provided in another way to jobseekers, before they reach the interview stage of the recruitment process.
Candidates cannot be asked about their pay history
Employers won’t be able to ask candidates what they are paid in their current role or what they have been paid for previous roles.
Employees will be able to request pay information
Employees will be able to request information from their employer, annually, regarding their individual pay level and the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.
Pay setting and career progression
Employers must make easily accessible to workers a description of the gender-neutral criteria used to define pay levels and career progression.
It is also important to consider the impact a salary pay gap can have on other aspects of overall compensation. The EU currently has a gender pension gap of 30% between men and women.
Gender pay gap reporting
Employers with at least 100 employees will have to publish information on the pay gap between female and male workers. Employers with at least 250 employees will report every year, while employers with between 150 and 249 employees will report every three years.
As of five years after the transposition of the Directive, employers with between 100 and 149 employees will also have to report every three years.
Pay assessment
Where pay reporting reveals a gender pay gap of at least 5%, and when the employer cannot justify the gap on basis of objective gender-neutral factors, employers will have to carry out a pay assessment, in co-operation with workers' representatives.
What is the evidence that pay transparency legislation has a positive impact on gender pay gaps?
In 2006, Denmark introduced pay transparency legislation for organisations over a certain size. Research showed that the impact of this legislation was a 7% reduction in the gender pay gap in the organisations included within the new rules. Further analysis showed that this reduction was primarily caused by a decrease in the wages of men rather than an increase in the wages of women.
Pay transparency legislation is being introduced all around the world. The challenge for most organisations is not just how to keep up with the changes, but how to put in mechanisms and processes to ensure compliance globally, managing increasing changes and the nuances of regional variations. For many companies, this now involves investing in technology to automate and integrate compliance and hiring specific DEI compliance experts to manage this process and protect the organisation against future issues.
Equal pay legislation requires employers to ensure “equal pay” for “equal work”
The UK Equality Act 2010 gives a woman the right to be paid the same as a man (and vice versa) when carrying out “equal work”
By law, 'equal work' counts as either:
Discrepancies in equal pay result in employers paying up to 6 years of back pay to every employee
Many grading and pay structures have evolved over time, which means it can be hard for managers to justify why one job is graded higher than another or paid more. If there is a difference in how jobs are paid, employers need to be able to demonstrate why. An inability to justify this delta can result in an equal pay claim.
If the employee succeeds in their equal pay discrimination claim, they are entitled to compensation consisting of back pay (if the claim is about pay) and/or damages (if the complaint is about some other contractual term).
Back pay can be awarded up to a maximum of six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland from the date that proceedings were filed with an employment tribunal.
In addition to back pay, employment tribunals may also award interest on the compensation and order that:
Leading employers have had to pay out over £1 billion in equal pay claims
The most high-profile equal pay claims have been brought over the last 10 years against some of the UK’s largest supermarkets, including Asda, The Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Morrisons.
These claims assert that it is unfair that shop floor workers – who are mostly women – are paid less those employed in distribution centres – who are mainly men. If these claims are successful, they could result in up to £8 billion being paid out in back pay.
In the public sector, In 2019, Glasgow City Council agreed a package of payments worth more than £500 million to settle equal pay claims. These arose from a pay and conditions scheme introduced ten years earlier, which led to workers in female-dominated roles, such as catering or cleaning, receiving up to £3 an hour less than those in male-dominated areas such as refuse collection. Additional payments were also agreed in 2022 reaching a total of £770 million.
Pay equity audits and a structured job evaluation process can provide a defence against an equal value challenge, but….
As an initial step, many companies start with a pay equity audit (PEA) to ensure their organisation is paying employees fairly.
In simple terms, a pay equity audit involves comparing the pay of employees doing “like for like” work in an organisation and investigating the causes of any pay differences that cannot be justified. To determine the fair definition of “like for like” work, many organisations put in place a structured job evaluation process. Job evaluation is a method of determining on a systematic basis the relative importance of a number of different jobs, while avoiding prejudice or discrimination.
A well implemented and managed equal pay audit, and job evaluation process, can provide a ‘moment-in-time’ defence against an equal value challenge. But...Accurate, up-to-date job descriptions are critical to ensuring equal pay evaluations
Accurate, up-to-date job descriptions (or profiles) are critical to implementing and managing pay equity audits, job evaluation processes and ensuring you have unbiased effective pay and grading structures.
A job evaluation process appraises individual ‘factors’ of compensatory characteristics – such as skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Specific job descriptions (or profiles) are evaluated against these factors to determine a score and translate the role into a grading and compensation structure.
In a global organisation, job evaluation can be used to create globally consistent grades or bands which are immune from the influence of local currency fluctuations and also help ensure compliance with any local equal pay legislation.
…One of the biggest challenges is the state of an organisation’s job descriptions
The implementation and ongoing management of a job evaluation process, relies on an organisation having in place job descriptions (or profiles) that are accurate, up-to-date and an acceptable description to both the business and employees who sit in those roles.
As a quick aside, the naming convention (descriptions verses profiles) and the level of detail required in this document (high level versus local variations) is often a big topic of debate in organisations, we’ll share guidance on this in a later post. For the purpose of simplicity, we are using the term “job description” as a catch all for all job documents, be they high level profiles or specific local variations.
Suffice to say, irrespective of the definition or level of detail of the content, this is one of the biggest challenges to the implementation and management of an effective pay equity audit and job evaluation process: the state of an organisation's job descriptions.
Here's what most organisations find when they lift the lid on their job descriptions:
The result of this “job description chaos” is an urgent need to review, update and cleanse the existing job structure and job catalogue. This is often an overwhelming task requiring stakeholders across multiple business areas and a considerable amount of time, effort and resources.
Keeping on top of your job data as your jobs and organisation changes is critical in keeping control of equal pay
Having invested the effort to define your job architecture and job catalog, you want to be able to govern how new roles are defined across the organisation to avoid recreating the chaos and risk that may have existed before.
McKinsey found that most organisations undertake re-structure on average every 3 years. Couple this with the day-to-day changes to how roles are executed and the need for new jobs to be created in line with changing needs, your job structure will never and should never remain static.
It is therefore essential to put a process in place to govern how new jobs are created and how existing jobs are updated on an on-going basis. However, this is where most organisations get stuck. Research shows that only 18 percent of organisations have proactive audit processes on maintaining their jobs
Without this governance, organisations risk recreating the chaos that may have existed before and exposing the organisation to risk of equal pay claims.
Job description software automates job governance and ongoing management, reducing future risk of equal pay claims
Innovative organisations are investing in technologies that help create, maintain, manage and govern their job architectures, catalogues and job description information to ensure that jobs and pay are fair, accurate and up-to-date.
Role Mapper Technologies Ltd
Kings Wharf, Exeter
United Kingdom
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