The EU Pay Transparency Directive is set to become a game-changer for gender equality in the workplace. Designed to close the gender pay gap, it introduces detailed gender pay gap reporting requirements for employers across the EU. If your organisation hasn’t already started preparing, now is the time to act.
In this blog, we’ll begin with a brief overview of the EU Pay Transparency Directive before outlining the specific gender pay gap reporting requirements and the key steps organisations need to take to prepare.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive mandates that employers go beyond general pay gap reporting and disclose gender pay disparities by categories of workers performing equal work or work of equal value. This marks a significant evolution in compliance requirements: organisations can no longer rely on job titles alone; they must be able to systematically group roles based on their underlying value to the organisation.
To meet this standard, a robust job evaluation methodology is essential. Job evaluation is the structured process of assessing the relative worth of roles by comparing them using consistent and objective criteria. This allows organisations to determine which roles are truly equivalent, regardless of job titles or where they sit in the organisational hierarchy.
Under the Directive, the factors used to evaluate whether work is of equal value include:
These are well-established principles in job evaluation and align with common frameworks used in compensation design. Importantly, the Directive requires that these evaluations are transparent, gender-neutral and consistently applied.
To meet the reporting requirements, organisations must disclose the following:
A company’s obligations under the Directive depend on its size:
Regardless of timing, all affected organisations should begin preparations now.
Complying with EU gender pay gap reporting hinges on one critical capability: your organisation must be able to group jobs of equal work or equal value. This means relying on objective criteria, such as skills, responsibilities, effort and working conditions, to evaluate and categorise jobs.
Without this groundwork, reporting becomes nearly impossible. Simply comparing people with the same job title isn’t enough. You must ensure a standardised and auditable system of job evaluation.
To ensure consistency and comparability with EU gender pay gap reporting requirements, organisations must establish clear governance over job descriptions. That means:
Employers must maintain an audit trail of job content even for positions that no longer exist. This historical data may be required for post-employment requests or internal audits.
By centralising job descriptions and evaluation data, you allow for easy comparison across job groupings, enabling EU Gender pay gap reporting transparency and compliance.
3. Conduct a Job Evaluation
If your organisation doesn’t already have a robust job evaluation framework, now is the time to implement one. Evaluating jobs based on value — not just job titles or pay — will be essential to segment workers appropriately for reporting.
Conclusion: Act Now
The EU Pay Transparency Directive introduces complex and detailed reporting requirements, especially when it comes to EU Gender Pay Gap reporting. However, the objective is simple: ensure fair pay for work of equal value. To succeed, employers must get their job data in order, adopt robust job evaluation frameworks and understand their workforce from a value-based lens.
Pay differentials affect virtually every organisation. When employees in similar roles receive vastly different remuneration, it creates inequities that erode trust and undermine organisational performance. These gaps rarely exist due to deliberate unfairness. They're the inevitable result of fragmented, poorly structured job architectures.
Without clear job frameworks in place to underpin pay, organisations operate blindly. It is difficult to identify existing disparities, let alone prevent new ones. The cost extends far beyond individual grievances: when pay equity suffers, so does employee engagement, employee retention, and ultimately, business performance.
The solution to pay differentials doesn't lie in quick, random fixes but in building robust job architectures and transparent pay structures that ensure fairness becomes embedded in how organisations value and reward employees.
Recent research reveals the scale of the pay differentials challenge. Despite growing recognition of the strategic importance of a job architecture, many organisations still operate without one entirely. Where a job architecture does exist, it often lacks the flexibility to adapt as an organisation evolves, quickly becoming obsolete and counterproductive.
This creates a fundamental disconnect - whilst a business transforms rapidly in response to market pressures, its underlying job structure remains static. The result is a growing misalignment between how work actually gets done and how it's formally recognised and rewarded.
The consequences extend far beyond individual dissatisfaction. Talented employees leave when they discover inequitable treatment, whilst team cohesion deteriorates as pay becomes a source of friction. Recruitment becomes increasingly challenging as organisational reputation suffers.
Compounding these internal pressures, regulatory scrutiny is intensifying across multiple jurisdictions. New pay transparency legislation is accelerating the urgency to address these inequities before they become public record, turning what was once a private HR challenge into a potential reputational and legal risk.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive, which is due to be implemented in 2026, requires organisations to disclose salary ranges and address pay gaps. This exemplifies this shift towards mandatory transparency. Similar measures are expanding globally to cover broader pay equity issues with financial penalties for non-compliance.
Organisations that take proactive steps to address pay differentials find themselves with significant competitive advantages. A well-designed job architecture provides the foundation for fair and defensible compensation decisions, while enabling agility as business needs evolve.
The key to an agile yet robust job architecture lies in establishing clear job levels with defined competency and skills requirements, including specific proficiency levels for each. A consistent job evaluation process helps remove subjective bias.
Transparent career pathways, showing possible routes across and up the job architecture, highlight potential opportunities to employees and can help retain them in the organisation when they are considering alternatives.
This systematic approach creates accountability at every level, reduces bias in decision-making and ensures that pay decisions can withstand both internal scrutiny and external examination.
Whilst a job architecture is essential for addressing pay differentials, its value also extends across multiple strategic priorities. It underpins effective performance management by defining clear expectations and providing a consistent framework for assessing capability.
Managers can make more confident, evidence-based decisions, whilst workforce development becomes easier to plan and target. At a broader level, a job architecture enables organisations to align talent with business objectives, respond more quickly to change and build long-term organisational resilience.
Addressing pay differentials is no longer a niche HR task; it’s a business-critical priority. As organisations face growing pressure to improve transparency, retain talent, and navigate complex regulations, having a clear and agile job architecture in place has never been more critical. It isn’t just about fairness — it’s about creating the structure needed to make confident, consistent decisions that stand up to scrutiny. A solid foundation enables organisations to respond faster to change, drive alignment across the workforce and plan for future capability needs with clarity. Rather than patching over problems with short-term fixes, organisations need a system that ensures fairness is built into how work is defined, valued and rewarded.
RoleMapper helps organisations create or refine their job architecture to establish clarity, ensure consistency, and support fair, transparent pay practices.
As growing organisations scale, particularly in fast-moving sectors, managing compensation becomes more than just a question of market alignment; it becomes a matter of fairness, consistency and compliance.
Without a clear structure, pay decisions can become reactive or inconsistent, increasing the risk of pay inequities and employee dissatisfaction. With new pay transparency legislation on the rise, a clear and well-structured job levelling framework is now a business necessity, not just a nice-to-have.
In this blog, we explore some of the most widely used job levelling frameworks and how they help growing companies make smarter pay decisions, whilst laying the groundwork for regulatory compliance and internal equity.
Job levelling defines consistent levels of work and responsibility across an organisation. It underpins compensation, career development, and performance management. However, it's also a critical enabler of pay transparency and equity.
Job levelling helps organisations to:
As legislation pushes for greater openness, such as the EU's Pay Transparency Directive which will require employers to share salary ranges and justify pay differences between comparable roles, organisations will need the clarity and structure that levelling provides.
Several widely adopted levelling frameworks can help fast-growing companies bring order to their compensation practices. Here are three of the most used:
The Radford (Aon) framework is well-established in tech and life sciences, offering a set of professional levels (P1–P6) that scale with increasing autonomy, responsibility, and business impact.
Roles are evaluated across factors such as:
This framework provides industry-specific benchmarks and career progression pathways tailored to technology and life sciences organisations. It emphasises technical expertise alongside business acumen, supporting both individual contributor and management tracks.
The GGS offers a more granular approach, with 25 grades grouped into broad bands that reflect hierarchy and role scope. It evaluates roles on criteria such as:
This system is especially useful for companies managing diverse job families (e.g., engineering, sales, operations) and needing a consistent cross-functional structure for pay banding. The GGS uses standardised evaluation criteria and detailed grade definitions to ensure consistency across global operations.
The Hay Method uses a detailed point-factor evaluation, scoring roles across:
Each factor is assessed using specific degree levels and weighted scoring systems. Know-how encompasses technical expertise, analytical skills, and human relations capabilities. Problem-solving evaluates thinking complexity and environmental constraints. Accountability measures decision-making authority, impact on results, and organisational scope of influence.
Many organisations choose to create bespoke frameworks by combining elements of established models with their values and culture. This hybrid approach allows for more flexibility while still supporting:
Crucially, any tailored model should be documented and repeatable; key requirements when disclosing pay information or explaining pay decisions under new regulations.
A robust job levelling framework is more than an HR tool; it's a strategic asset that enables:
With new legal requirements emerging, including obligations to share salary ranges in job ads and justify pay differences between comparable roles, the cost of doing nothing is rising. Job levelling provides the structure needed to meet these obligations — and build a more equitable culture along the way.
For growing organisations, especially those navigating competitive talent markets and increasing regulatory scrutiny, job levelling isn’t just about operational efficiency — it’s about risk management, employee trust, and long-term scalability.
Whether you adopt a framework like Radford, GGS, or Hay, or create a tailored version to reflect your unique structure, the goal remains the same: to make pay decisions that are fair, defensible, and transparent.
If you're building or refining your job levelling approach to support compensation strategy and pay transparency readiness, RoleMapper can help. We work with scaling organisations to design frameworks that balance structure with flexibility.
In today’s globalised business environment, organisations are increasingly operating across borders, cultures and time zones. As a result, the need for clear, consistent, and adaptable job profiles has never been greater. Well-crafted job profiles are essential for fair compensation practices, internal benchmarking, career development, and overall organisational effectiveness, especially in a global context.
This blog explores the steps involved in creating job profiles that work seamlessly across an international workforce.
It’s essential to first distinguish between a job profile and a job description, as each serves a unique purpose within the organisation.
A well-structured job profile begins with a clear summary that defines the role’s purpose. This should explain why the job exists, how it contributes to the organisation’s objectives, and its scope within the broader organisational structure.
Including details such as reporting lines and the team context is also important. Additionally, an effective job profile should accurately reflect the role’s job family and level, providing sufficient detail to distinguish similar roles at varying levels. This helps match roles to appropriate job models, ensuring consistent job evaluation, internal equity, and alignment with market standards.
A job profile should also contain high-level responsibilities which summarise the role’s core deliverables and accountabilities. Ideally, each role should be distilled into a maximum of six key responsibilities, capturing its main functions and impact.
These responsibilities provide a clear picture of the role’s complexity, scope and expected contributions, helping HR, managers, and compensation teams make informed decisions throughout the employee lifecycle.
In addition to responsibilities, job profiles should outline the necessary skills and competencies for successful performance in the role. This information is critical for supporting pay equity, guiding progression, and facilitating effective workforce planning.
Profiles should specify both technical skills (e.g., data analysis, systems expertise) and behavioural competencies (e.g., collaboration, problem-solving). It’s essential to highlight the difference between what is essential and what is desirable. Furthermore, including proficiency levels (e.g., basic, intermediate, advanced, expert) for each key skill helps differentiate between role levels, supports fair pay decisions, and provides a foundation for career development and succession planning.
A well-defined job profile offers the foundation for accurately determining the appropriate job level for a role. By clearly articulating the role’s purpose, responsibilities, skills, and proficiency levels, the profile serves as a structured basis for evaluating the role within the company’s job architecture.
Factors such as decision-making authority, complexity, and impact are assessed to ensure fair and consistent levelling across the organisation. This process supports equitable pay practices and aligns career pathways, providing a scalable and transparent framework for all roles.
Job profiles are integral to making informed compensation and benefits decisions. Accurate job profiles allow organisations to benchmark roles against external market data, set competitive salary ranges, and design benefits packages that are both fair and competitive.
Transparent job profiles also support pay equity audits and compliance with equal pay legislation across different jurisdictions. By documenting the rationale for pay levels and benefits, organisations can demonstrate fairness and respond confidently to pay equity reporting requirements.
Beyond compensation, job profiles play a pivotal role in career development and workforce planning. They help employees understand the criteria for progression within the organisation and map out potential career paths. For leadership teams, job profiles provide a basis for succession planning and talent management across the global workforce.
Job profiles are far more than just tools for defining roles; they are the foundation for fair compensation, organisational clarity, and employee engagement in a global workforce. By investing in clear, consistent, and inclusive job profiles, organisations can ensure pay equity, support career development and build a culture of transparency and trust, no matter where their employees are based.
Compensation leaders face an unprecedented challenge. Navigating complex legislation whilst responding to demands for pay transparency and adapting to rapidly evolving skill requirements, all whilst maintaining internal consistency and fairness. Beneath these pressures often lies a silent blocker that undermines even the most forward-thinking pay strategies: outdated job structures.
A job architecture often operates in the background of compensation decisions, but when the underlying framework is inconsistent, incomplete or disconnected from business reality, it creates cascading problems that compound over time. What starts as minor data inconsistencies evolves into significant barriers to performance, equity and growth.
Through our conversations with compensation leaders across growing organisations and the challenges they face with job structures, four fundamental challenges consistently emerge:
The foundation of strategic compensation is reliable job data, yet most organisations operate with a patchwork of information. Job titles multiply without logic, created at different times by different people using inconsistent standards. Role boundaries blur, critical elements, such as skills, responsibilities and levels, remain vague or are missing entirely. This poor quality job data creates downstream implications that affect benchmarking accuracy and compliance readiness.
The shift toward skills-based compensation presents both opportunities and challenges. Organisations want to reward capability and potential, not just tenure, but connecting skills to compensation requires precision. Pay-for-performance demands clear skill proficiency definitions. Career progression needs visible skill development pathways. Without granular, level-aligned skills data integrated into job profiles, skills-based pay remains an aspiration for many companies rather than an actionable strategy.
Levelling decisions are fundamental to pay fairness and consistency, yet most frameworks rely on manual processes prone to subjectivity and error. HR teams spend weeks evaluating individual roles without consistent criteria, leading to hierarchical misalignments and internal disputes over seniority. The absence of embedded levelling tools means compensation decisions rest on opinion rather than objective data, creating vulnerability to challenge and compliance risk.
As organisations scale and evolve, governance complexity multiplies. Every new role, team restructure or market shift adds pressure to already strained systems. Without dynamic frameworks and job structures to manage change, governance becomes reactive catch-up rather than proactive strategy. Disconnected data sources, manual approval processes and a lack of visibility create friction precisely where agility is essential.
These challenges don't exist in isolation; they reinforce each other. Poor data quality makes skills integration impossible. Manual levelling processes slow decision-making. Governance gaps allow inconsistencies to multiply. The result isn't just operational inefficiency; it's a strategic limitation that constrains growth and undermines equity initiatives.
Without the ability to quickly create, evaluate and govern roles effectively, organisations lose competitive advantage. They respond slowly to market opportunities, struggle to implement meaningful pay equity frameworks and find themselves unprepared for regulatory requirements. Most critically, they damage employee confidence when career paths remain unclear and pay decisions appear arbitrary.
Forward-thinking organisations are rethinking their job architecture as a strategic capability rather than static HR documentation. Advanced technology platforms enable integrated approaches that address all four challenge areas simultaneously by building intelligent job architectures that adapt to organisational change whilst maintaining structural integrity.
Fragmented job data can be transformed into coherent, level-aligned structures using machine learning, which can also embed levelling logic directly into workflows, integrate granular skills frameworks and provide comprehensive governance through unified workspaces.
The next evolution focuses on making job architecture truly adaptive, capable of responding to internal changes and external market shifts in real-time. This means automated access to emerging job and skill intelligence, insight into premium skill valuations and maintained structural integrity as roles evolve. Adaptive systems preserve governance whilst enabling the agility that modern organisations demand.
Outdated job structures may operate invisibly, but their impact shapes every compensation decision. They constrain strategic initiatives, limit equity progress and create operational friction that scales with organisational growth. In an environment where talent competition intensifies and regulatory scrutiny increases, a dynamic job architecture becomes essential infrastructure for sustainable success.
Ready to transform your job architecture? RoleMapper provides the comprehensive workspace and intelligent automation that compensation leaders need to build dynamic, level-aligned job structures in weeks, not months. Discover how our integrated approach to data transformation, skills intelligence, and embedded governance can unlock your organisation's compensation strategy.
Growth brings opportunity, but it also brings complexity. As organisations scale rapidly from dozens to hundreds or thousands of employees, the informal compensation practices that worked in the early stages quickly become inadequate.
Without structured job evaluation frameworks, scaling companies often find themselves with inconsistent pay practices, unclear career progressions, and mounting employee frustration about fairness and transparency.
This challenge has become even more pressing with the introduction of pay transparency legislation across multiple jurisdictions. For example, the EU Pay Transparency Directive, which comes into effect in 2026, requires companies to demonstrate objective job evaluation methodologies when comparing roles.
Organisations without structured evaluation frameworks risk significant non-compliance fines and reputational damage when their ad hoc compensation practices fail to withstand regulatory scrutiny of role comparability and pay equity.
The transition from ad hoc to systematic job evaluation isn't just about compliance, it's about building the infrastructure necessary to sustain growth while maintaining the culture and talent that drove early success.
During rapid scaling, many organisations operate with "compensation by precedent." New hires are benchmarked against existing employees, promotions occur without clear levelling criteria, and salary adjustments are made reactively when retention becomes a concern. This approach creates compounding problems as the organisation grows.
Without structured evaluation, role definitions become inconsistent across teams. Two engineers with identical responsibilities might hold different job titles and salary bands simply because different managers hired them. Marketing professionals might advance faster than their operations counterparts, not because of superior performance, but because marketing leadership has a clearer vision of career progression.
These inconsistencies undermine employee trust and expose organisations to significant legal and financial risks. EU pay transparency legislation requires organisations to demonstrate that roles of equal or comparable value receive equal compensation. Organisations without structured job evaluation systems may find themselves unable to adequately compare roles of similar value, facing potential penalties for non-compliance and competitive disadvantages in talent acquisition.
Structured job evaluation offers a systematic approach to managing compensation complexity at scale. By establishing clear criteria for role classification, organisations create repeatable processes that ensure consistency regardless of which manager is making decisions.
A well-designed evaluation framework considers multiple factors such as the complexity of problem-solving required, the scope of decision-making authority, the level of specialised knowledge needed, and the impact on business outcomes. These factors are weighted and scored consistently across all positions, creating an objective foundation for compensation decisions that can demonstrate compliance with equal pay for equal value requirements.
This systematic approach becomes particularly valuable during periods of rapid hiring and is essential for meeting regulatory obligations around role comparability. When new roles are created or existing positions evolve quickly, structured evaluation ensures these changes are reflected appropriately in compensation structures while maintaining the ability to justify pay decisions based on objective job value assessments.
Rapid scaling requires more than just hiring; it demands strategic talent development and retention. Structured job evaluation creates clear pathways for career progression and provides employees with transparency about growth opportunities.
When progression criteria are explicitly defined and consistently applied, high-performing employees can see exactly what skills, experiences, and achievements are required to advance. This clarity helps retain top talent by demonstrating the organisation's investment in their long-term development rather than leaving career growth to chance.
Structured job evaluation also transforms performance management conversations from subjective discussions about "doing well" to objective conversations anchored in specific competencies and measurable outcomes. Managers can provide more meaningful feedback when they understand exactly what distinguishes performance at each level, while employees receive more explicit guidance on development focus areas.
Additionally, structured evaluation helps identify skill gaps and development needs across the organisation, enabling informed decisions about training investments, hiring priorities, and organisational design changes needed to support continued growth.
The key to successful implementation lies in recognising that structured job evaluation should enhance rather than replace existing decision-making processes. The best frameworks provide guidance and consistency while allowing for the flexibility and speed that scaling organisations require.
Starting with pilot programmes in specific departments allows organisations to refine their approach before comprehensive rollouts. This phased implementation builds buy-in from leadership and employees while minimising operational disruption.
Structured job evaluation isn't about creating bureaucracy, it's about building the systematic foundation that allows rapidly scaling organisations to maintain fairness, consistency, and strategic focus as they grow.
Rolemapper provides the technology platform and expertise needed to implement structured job evaluation efficiently.
Rolemapper enables organisations to establish consistent, transparent and defensible compensation practices without the traditional administrative burden. Our solution helps scaling organisations build robust job architecture frameworks that support both growth objectives and compliance requirements. With automated role comparison capabilities, standardised evaluation criteria and built-in benchmarking tools.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive aims to reduce pay discrimination and close the gender pay gap by promoting openness around pay practices, as well as how to define and communicate pay principles. One of its key components, Article 6, mandates that:
"Employers shall make easily accessible to their workers the criteria that are used to determine workers’ pay, pay levels and pay progression."
This means that companies must now provide clarity on how pay is structured, how job value is assessed and the principles guiding these decisions. To comply with the Directive and create a fairer workplace, employers must clearly define and communicate their pay principles.
A solid pay transparency strategy begins with defining your pay philosophy, which provides the foundation for your compensation framework. Your pay philosophy should outline the principles that guide your organisation’s pay decisions.
Key questions to consider include when defining and communicating pay principles:
A clear pay philosophy ensures consistency and provides a context for pay decisions, making them easier to explain to employees. Without a strong pay philosophy, transparency efforts can lead to confusion or mistrust. This philosophy also supports compliance with the Directive, enabling employees to understand how and why pay levels are established.
The Directive doesn't demand full transparency immediately, but organisations may need to move further along the pay transparency spectrum to achieve compliance. The aim should be to determine where you are now and where you want to get to.
Consider these questions:
The potential negative impact of increasing pay transparency is that, when pay disparities are uncovered, they can have a detrimental effect on employee morale, satisfaction and retention.
Before increasing visibility, it is important to proactively identify and address any pay disparities. Regular internal audits can help uncover:
Taking action to correct these disparities is essential not only for compliance but also for trust-building. The Directive encourages organisations to close pay gaps to ensure equal pay for equal work and reduce the risk of discrimination.
Step Four: Share Your Pay Structures
Once you’ve defined your pay philosophy and principles and addressed any disparities, the next step is to share your pay structures. Article 6 of the Directive requires that the criteria used to determine pay are “easily accessible” to all workers.
This includes:
Historically, pay decisions have been treated as a “black box” by organisations - hidden from employees and only accessible to a select few. The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires organisations to move towards a “glass box” model, where pay decisions are visible and understandable.
This shift involves more than changing policies, it requires a cultural change within the organisation. Employers must:
Implementing pay transparency and associated pay principles may be complex, but the rewards are significant. Organisations that increase their transparency around pay will not only comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive but also enhance employee trust and satisfaction, improve recruitment and retention, strengthen their employer brand, and reduce the risks of legal and reputational issues.
The Directive presents an opportunity to modernise pay practices, promote fairness, and create a culture of openness around pay.
As organisations evolve, whether through rapid growth, product expansion, or market shifts, one constant challenge remains: how to structure work in a way that balances clarity and fairness for employees with the need for organisational agility. That’s where a job architecture comes in.
A job architecture forms the building blocks of an organisation. It provides a framework for defining and aligning jobs within your organisation based on the type of work performed.
A well-designed job architecture provides the structure to scale your business and the clarity to drive informed decisions. It also provides a foundation to support emerging priorities such as moving to a skills-based approach or responding to new pay transparency legislation.
In a fast-moving environment, building a job architecture is only half the challenge. The real goal is to futureproof it. Here are some tips on how to do this:
To build a resilient and scalable job architecture, make sure you prioritise job families, not just job titles. Job titles often vary across teams and are shaped by legacy systems or personal preferences, making them an unreliable foundation for workforce planning.
Instead, focus on defining job families. These are groups of related jobs within an organisation that share similar skillsets, nature of work and career paths. The essential nature of the activities and the basic skills used will be similar for all roles within a job family. However, the level of responsibility, the skills required to perform the work, and the scope of the role may vary.
Organising work in this way creates a flexible, future-ready framework that can adapt as your organisation evolves.
Clear job levels are crucial for distinguishing roles based on their complexity, scope, and decision-making authority. A robust levelling framework promotes internal equity, helps employees understand their progression opportunities, and gives managers a consistent way to evaluate roles across teams. A well-calibrated levelling structure also underpins effective pay transparency, enabling you to explain how pay is determined for each role.
Critically, a levelling framework futureproofs your job architecture by creating a scalable structure that evolves with your organisation. As new roles are created, they can be easily aligned to the rest of the roles in the organisation using the levelling framework.
As roles evolve and technology advances, integrating skills into your job architecture is essential for long-term resilience. A future-ready skills framework defines the technical and behavioural capabilities needed at each level and across job families.
By embedding skills into job design and your job architecture, you enable more agile talent decisions, which, again, supports internal mobility. A skills-based approach ensures your organisation can respond quickly to change and remain competitive in a constantly shifting landscape.
With rising expectations around transparency, driven by increased legislation, such as the EU Pay Transparency Directive, organisations must ensure that their job architecture can withstand external scrutiny. This means building a structure that is internally consistent, externally benchmarkable, and clearly aligned with your pay strategy and pay principles.
To effectively futureproof, your job architecture should enable roles to be grouped in ways that make potential pay equity issues visible. Technology, particularly AI, can support this by using natural language processing to analyse job content and identify groupings based on work similarity.
Even the best-designed job architecture will age quickly if it is not maintained. Regular reviews will ensure that each element of your job architecture structure remains relevant. Involving senior leaders and people managers in these reviews helps maintain alignment with shifting organisational goals.
In a changing world of work, a strong job architecture provides more than structure — it offers stability, clarity, and a path forward. By focusing on job families, skills, levels, and transparency, you can build a system that not only supports today’s needs but also adapts to future challenges.
The European Union is moving towards a new era of workplace equality with its Pay Transparency Directive. This legislation aims to combat pay discrimination, improve pay progression and close the persistent gender pay gap across EU member states.
The latest data shows an overall EU gender pay gap of 12%, although there is significant variation between countries. Latvia has the highest gap at 19%, and Luxembourg has the lowest at -0.9% (showing that women outearn men).
A key aspect of the Directive that organisations need to pay attention to is its focus on pay progression, which plays a crucial role in achieving long-term pay equity.
Unstructured and unclear processes for awarding pay increases will likely be a key cause of the continuing EU gender pay gap.
Numerous studies have shown that women are less likely to be awarded pay rises, and this is not necessarily due to women asking for them less than men. For example, one study found that women ask for a raise just as often as men, but men are more likely to be successful. Women who asked obtained a raise 15% of the time, while men obtained a pay increase 20% of the time.
Article 6 of the EU Pay Transparency Directive states that: “Employers shall make easily accessible to their workers the criteria that are used to determine workers’ pay progression.”
Pay progression is defined in the Directive as the process by which a worker moves to a higher pay level. The Directive also outlines the criteria related to pay progression and states that these can include individual performance, skills development and seniority.
This means that employers need to be clear on why pay varies across an organisation. They also need to be able to explain the criteria for pay progression and why current pay for one role differs from that of another.
Pay decisions can often be associated with bias and subjectivity. By requiring visibility of progression criteria, the Directive focuses on these practices and aims to eliminate bias from compensation decisions.
The EU Directive is shining a light on fair pay practices and talent management practices, specifically career (and therefore pay) progression and performance management. To comply with the EU Directive, organisations need to have clear mechanisms in place to:
Organisations will need to clearly define and demonstrate the criteria for pay progression both within and between roles.
This involves providing transparency around the specific requirements for progression, including proficiency in technical skills, soft skills, behavioural competencies, knowledge, and relevant experience.
By outlining these criteria, employees can understand what is needed to advance within their current role or transition to higher-level positions. Visibility of these progression standards helps ensure fairness and reduces bias by making career pathways clear and accessible to all employees.
Organisations must demonstrate how employees measure up against progression criteria to justify pay decisions and differentials. This necessitates a robust, unbiased process for assessing employee performance and proficiency against defined progression standards, which is crucial for justifying pay decisions and differentials.
Recent research highlights significant challenges in this area:
These statistics underscore the complexities organisations face in implementing fair and transparent pay progression systems. Without a clear skills taxonomy and proficiency measurements, companies struggle to objectively assess employee performance and justify pay decisions.
Finally, organisations need to establish a mechanism to share their catalogue of jobs, clearly displaying the progression criteria within each job role and between job roles from one level to the next, and how this aligns with their pay structure.
This could involve creating an interactive career framework or skills matrix accessible to all employees via an internal portal or HR system. The framework should illustrate the skills, competencies, and experience required for each role and level alongside corresponding salary bands or ranges.
In summary, to ensure compliance with Article 6 of the EU Pay Transparency Directive, organisations will need to implement clear and robust mechanisms to define, assess and share progression criteria. This involves:
By implementing these measures, organisations can create a more equitable, transparent, and motivating work environment, whilst also meeting the requirements of the EU Directive.
In just over a year, the EU Pay Transparency Directive will mandate the adoption of pay transparency processes and reporting for companies with over 100 employees in the EU.
In preparation, organisations across the EU are grappling with a fundamental question: how to identify potential areas of concern that need to be addressed in advance of the legislation coming into force. The answer lies in a critical component of pay transparency implementation, job groupings.
Job groupings are the organisational equivalent of creating a detailed map before embarking on a complex journey. Properly structured job groupings provide the essential framework for meaningful pay transparency. They serve as the foundation upon which organisations can build equitable reward structures, identify potential pay gaps, and demonstrate compliance with the new Directive.
As Job groupings can be identified from a job architecture, for those organisations with a job architecture in place, they will have the ability to easily identify job groupings and will find themselves at a significant advantage when the Directive comes into force. Not only will these groupings help highlight any pay inequalities that need to be addressed, but they will also provide a structured framework for explaining pay differences based on objective criteria – a key requirement under the new legislation.
In this long-form article, we'll explore what the Directive says about job groupings and what this means for organisations. We will also talk about the different ways of developing job groupings. Finally, we’ll outline how RoleMapper is leveraging machine learning to help organisations with the formation of job groupings and ultimately with compliance with pay transparency legislation.
To comply with the right for employees to know the criteria being used for determining pay and what comparable employees are paid, as well as the equal pay reporting requirements, the EU Directive requires jobs to be grouped into “Categories of Worker”.
The Directive uses the term “categories of worker” to describe job groupings.
The Directive defines ‘category of workers’ as:
"Workers performing the same work or work of equal value grouped in a non-arbitrary manner based on the non-discriminatory and objective gender-neutral criteria”
This means that employees have the right to request, and receive in writing, information on their individual pay level and the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers performing the same work as them or work of equal value to theirs.
Although the Directive refers to workers, it is important to consider this as being about jobs and not people. Therefore, we will be referring to job groupings and not worker groupings.
Fundamentally, employees have a right to request information about pay levels for groups of workers who perform what is deemed to be the same work, similar work or work of equal value as them. This means that employees can ask which job grouping they are in and receive information about it. If employers have not grouped jobs in understandable and explainable ways, employees can challenge whether they are in the correct grouping.
Therefore, in advance of the Directive’s implementation, organisations need to ensure they have an up-to-date, well-structured job architecture in place. From this, job groupings can be determined to show which jobs are equal in terms of work or equal value.
To form a comprehensive picture, at RoleMapper, we advise organisations to use their job architecture to build up their job groupings in three ways:
First, identify jobs of equal work.
Grouping jobs together of equal work involves identifying jobs where the same work is being done. These are usually jobs with the same job title and/or the same job description. For example, two HR Business Partner jobs might face off to different parts of the organisation, but the job content of their roles is essentially the same, as are the job titles and job descriptions. These groupings could exist as job families in some organisations.
Grouping jobs together doing similar work involves identifying jobs that are doing similar work at a similar level or jobs with similar characteristics. Organisations need to understand which jobs are similar both in terms of the work but also in terms of one or more of the factors that make up the value of a job, i.e. skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. These are the objective job evaluation criteria outlined stated in the Directive
Finally, identify jobs of equal value.
A job grouping with jobs of equal value would include all roles where the value, as determined by objective criteria (skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions), is equal.
Whereas jobs in the previous category may be similar in only one factor, jobs of equal value are similar when summing up all the factors. If an organisation uses a structured job evaluation process, a way of assessing whether jobs are of equal value would be whether the scores at the end of the process are similar or equal.
To illustrate, this diagram shows the output of a job evaluation process on three roles.
The jobs have different scores in the four factors, but the total value is the same. They are therefore of equal value.
If organisations don’t currently use a structured job evaluation process, they will need to ensure that there is some way of assessing the total value of jobs to determine whether they are of equal value.
What this means is that organisations will need to have the ability to look at the value of their jobs across the whole organisation. There will need to be a way of finding jobs that on the surface may have no similarities at all, but could actually be deemed to be of equal value.
In some high profile (and high cost to the organisation) recent court cases, examples of different jobs which have been ruled by the courts to be of equal value include:
These examples show that a wide range of jobs can be categorised at the same level in terms of value and therefore pay.
In the previous section, we discussed different ways to form job groupings. The reason for identifying these groupings is to see if there are any pay anomalies within the groupings that need to be addressed.
The reality of the EU Directive is that employees can request to see the pay level of other employees whose jobs are at the same level of value. So organisations need to have a way of easily grouping jobs of equal value to address any pay anomalies in advance of the legislation.
However, for many organisations, there are some key obstacles:
Many organisations think they can rely on job titles as a mechanism to identify jobs of equal value. Whilst this can be a good starting point, there are usually issues with the state of job titling across organisations that make this approach problematic:
Inconsistent job titles: For many organisations, job titles are a bit of a mess. With no central framework for job titles, it can be challenging to easily group jobs together in this way.
An example there might be two roles called Data Scientist and Data Engineer, which, despite the different job titles, are very similar in terms of job content. If these roles sit in separate areas of the organisation, their similarity may not be immediately apparent, and they could end up in different job groupings.
Another example of two seemingly different jobs involving similar work might be a Project Manager role and a Change Manager role. Despite the different job titles, the job content could actually show many similarities.
Same job title, different job: For those organisations that do have a structured job title framework, it is often the case that this is not consistently applied across the organisation, so it is very likely that anomalies exist.
There is often not a great deal of governance around job titling, which means that local job titles will not match the standard job title. For example, we hear a lot of examples where managers have used the job profile title to get the appropriate level (and salary) for a role, but then created a job that is fundamentally different to the original intended job title.
Same job title, different value of work: The next challenge is where jobs have the same title, but a fundamentally different level of work is involved. For example, take a Project Manager in an Engineering team vs a Project Manager in Finance. It is highly likely there will be a difference in the skill levels and responsibility involved in projects managing scrum teams or technology development, compared to the skills and experience required to project manage Finance projects.
These skills and experience would be reflected in availability and price in the marketplace. If relying on job title alone, these jobs would appear to be of equal value. But if both roles were evaluated using a structured process, the difference in their value would become apparent.
Therefore, relying on job titles to identify job groupings will not be enough to comply with the requirements of the Directive. It could cause issues with accuracy of reporting and open an organisation up to risk.
Although job descriptions aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Directive, they are the fundamental building blocks for job evaluation and the creation of job groupings.
Job descriptions outline the key responsibilities and requirements of a role, which is used to determine the objective criteria (skills, level of responsibility, effort and working conditions) for job evaluation. They are therefore a critical input for determining job groupings.
However, there are also fundamental issues with job descriptions in organisations:
Lack of consistency - Often, there is no standardised process, format, or central repository for job descriptions. Different teams create their versions, leading to duplication and inconsistency. For example, multiple versions of a Project Manager job description may exist, each with varied content despite describing the same role.
No overall governance or audit trail - There’s also often a lack of centralised oversight for the job description process. Changes are typically made through endless email chains with tracked changes, making it nearly impossible to decipher who made what changes and when. This chaotic approach leads to confusion, inefficiency and inadequate records.
Out of date - Job descriptions frequently fail to reflect the current skills required for a role. They may be outdated or written by someone unfamiliar with the role. An up-to-date job description is essential for accurately determining which job groupings a role should be in.
There are some key ways that technology can be leveraged to help organisations identify job groupings.
Enabling disparate job content to be consolidated in one place
We are using automated text extraction tools to pull structured information from unstructured data sources, like PDFs or scanned job descriptions provided by clients. These tools extract relevant fields (e.g. job titles, job description, requirements, etc) and convert them into a structured format for further processing.
This means that all the job descriptions for an organisation can be pulled together in a central location and structured in a consistent format. This is a fundamental starting point for determining which jobs are of equal value.
Machine learning can then be used to automatically cluster and classify roles based on historical data to build an intelligent role taxonomy. This helps with grouping similar roles and ensuring consistent use of terms across different job descriptions.
Using AI and Natural Language Processing to identify similarities and commonalities in job roles
Often, job content is static bits of data housed on a spreadsheet. It is challenging to manually analyse this to find similarities in job roles.
We are leveraging advancements in AI and Natural Language Processing to process large data sets from across an organisation and rapidly identify similarities and commonalities in job roles. This enables the creation of groupings which might not be apparent on the surface.
This technology enables organisations to look across their whole organisation to rapidly identify:
These can then form the focus of further analysis from a pay point of view to see if there are disparities that need to be urgently addressed.
As companies prepare to meet the European Pay Transparency Directive's requirements for pay reporting and disclosure, those with a job architecture in place and well-defined job groupings will find themselves at a significant advantage. Not only do these groupings facilitate more accurate pay gap analysis, but they also provide a structured framework for explaining pay differences based on objective criteria – a key requirement under the new legislation.
However, for many organisations, identifying job groupings can be a challenging process because of factors such as a chaotic job titling structure and inconsistent, ungoverned and out-of-date job descriptions.
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