For many organisations, job data and job content is chaotic, inconsistent and unstructured with no governance or overall management.
Many organisations exist as a long list of job titles that have been added to organically as the organisation has grown, changed, merged or acquired. If an organisation does have a job structure in place, it is often the case that a streamlined structure was implemented but, over time, this has been difficult to govern and manage.
Introducing a job family structure can help consolidate, review, cleanse and streamline your job data and job content. Once a job family framework is in place, it provides a solid foundation for many key organisational processes.
Josh Bersin refers to job families as “Guilds” or “Professional Groups” as roles are grouped on similar skills requirements. He recommends that each job family is owned by a capability leader, who is then responsible for keeping track of the skills and technologies that people in the group need, as well as making sure they are also aware of wider career options that utilise their skills.
RoleMapper's Guide to Job Families focuses on the importance of implementing a Job Family framework and its key benefits, which includes:
We've also created a bank of Job Family examples to help bring a Job Family framework to life.
Organisations are evolving at an unprecedented pace. The typical enterprise organisation has undertaken five major changes in the past three years — and nearly 75% expect to multiply the types of major change initiatives they will undertake in the next three years
“A job architecture provides the foundation for implementing a skills-based approach within an organisation”
When the pace of change was relatively slow, jobs could be described using traditional job descriptions. These would define the exact nature of the work that an individual needed to do, usually in a long list of tasks and remained static over time.
However, an increasing number of organisations are now recognising that defining work in these ways has downsides, the key one being that it can put the brakes on organisational agility.
Transitioning to a skills-based approach can provide organisations with the flexibility required to adapt during periods of significant change. However, reaping the advantages of this approach hinges on the initial investment of time and effort to establish a robust foundation through a well-designed and effectively managed job architecture.
A skills-based approach is where organisations define work by deconstructing jobs into critical tasks and outcomes and identifying the current and emerging skills required.
A skills-based approach to defining work and jobs involves focusing on the skills and abilities needed to perform tasks and contribute to an organisation’s goals. There is less focus on where jobs and people sit within a business and more focus on understanding the jobs, works and skills required across the whole organisation. The work that needs to be done is broken down into discrete segments of work and the requirements are mapped into identifiable skills clusters.
Instead of relying solely on traditional job descriptions, organisations adopting this approach are developing skills-based job profiles that focus on the skills necessary for the role. This enables a clearer understanding of what is expected and helps in recruiting, evaluating, and developing talent. It also makes it easier to spot skills gaps then make plans to fix these either by redeploying people with the relevant skills internally or hiring externally.
One of the key impacts of this rapid evolution is the need for a radical, new approach to how we define and describe jobs and work.
Recent research by Deloitte found clear benefits of a skills-based approach both in terms of better business results and also an improved employee experience. Organisations who had embedded a skills-based approach were:
In the Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 93% of respondents said moving away from a focus on jobs – and towards skills – was important or very important to their organisation’s success. Yet only 20% believed that their organisation was very ready to tackle the challenge.
From our experience of working with clients moving to a skills-based approach, the main barrier is a chaotic job architecture.
A job architecture forms the building blocks of an organisation. It provides the framework upon which you can extract, align and manage how skills are distributed and required across the organisation.
If an organisation’s job architecture is chaotic, inconsistent and without governance, moving to a skills-based approach will be an uphill battle.
A well-designed job architecture can play a crucial role in facilitating the transition to a skills-based approach by:
Reviewing your organisation's job architecture framework can feel like a daunting prospect. We've worked with organisations that have spent more than 18 months carrying out this task manually. If it takes this long, then by the time you've completed it, it's likely out-of-date, not to mention maintenance and governance of a manual process creating additional challenges.
Our proprietary AI and advanced Natural Language Processing allow our customers to transform and digitise their job data into best-in-class, inclusive job descriptions and a robust, future-focused job architecture and job titling skills framework. The availability of good job data will enable organisations to easily shift towards a skills-based approach.
The process of inclusive job design sits at the heart of your ability to attract, retain, reward and progress talent across your organisation.
There have been significant shifts in the world of work that have driven creating inclusive jobs to the top of the priority list for leading organisations.
We are operating in ever-changing, volatile markets with increased legislation, particularly around pay equity and transparency. Combine this with a new generation who are expecting a more employee-centric, self-service model to help them navigate career paths up and around an organisation, and you have a clear business imperative to drive change - a key driver being inclusive job descriptions.
Creating inclusive job descriptions is more than just re-working the language and copy on a page. It is a sequence of key steps in a job design process that will enable you to create job descriptions that reflect, in an inclusive way, the work that your organisation needs done now and in the future . The outputs of this process will be debiased job descriptions that will truly make an impact at each stage of the employee lifecycle.
Inclusive job design is the process of designing a job in a way that is unbiased and reflects the actual job that needs to be done - rather than making assumptions about the job and/or job holder.
Complexity is a real barrier to inclusion. If a job description is simply a long list of tasks, people find it hard to see how their experience and skills can transfer to fulfil a manager’s long wish-list of deliverables. If there are too many responsibilities, or if they are overly complex, research has shown that it will very likely put people off applying for the role.
There are three key areas to focus on to ensure your requirements are inclusive. First, which of the requirements are truly essential? Our own research found that, on average, 60% of the requirements listed on a job description aren’t actually essential to be successful in the role. Furthermore, research shows that women will not put themselves forward for a role if they don’t meet 80-100% of the criteria.
Make it a mandatory step in your job design process to assess which flexible and hybrid working options will work for a role, and challenge yourself to consider options that have not been tried before. Make sure the flexible working options available for the role are fully explained in the job description. If it is decided that a role is not suitable for some options, document the reasons why to ensure that they can be justified.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen found that the average user reads at most 20% of what’s on a page. People tend to scan information that they see online, rather than read it. It’s therefore crucial that you convey the key information about the role in a way that is easy to understand. Long drawn-out job descriptions will put a lot of people off.
The final step is something most organisations find the hardest to do, and that is to systematically embed the principles of inclusive job design into the way that jobs are designed and the way in which job descriptions are written.
Create a process and guidance for anyone to use in your organisation who is involved in job design and writing job descriptions. Put governance in place to make sure that inclusive job design principles are being followed.
Our new public sector 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:
This job architecture guide 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 paths, 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 new directive, the EU pay transparency legislation 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 EU pay transparency legislation 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 EU pay transparency legislation, 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.
Key actions for organisations:
Pay equity 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 a pay equity 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:
The most high-profile pay equity 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.
de Novo Solutions, a leading provider of industry vertical solutions, digital transformation and business support services for both Oracle Cloud and ServiceNow applications, has today announced a further strategic partnership with RoleMapper, an award-winning AI-powered, job management and job description platform.
This move comes as more and more organisations are turning to skills-based hiring as their primary talent strategy in an effort to find more efficient ways to discover talent faster. Adopting a skills-based approach also has the potential to significantly impact an organisation’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
With debias and inclusion at its core, the RoleMapper platform allows organisations to fast track the creation, cleansing and ongoing management of job architectures, job catalogues and job descriptions. Powered by AI, RoleMapper transforms job data into a consistent, quality, future-focused, format, RoleMapper equips HR leaders with actionable intelligence, therefore enabling them to create, shape, and enrich their organisation’s culture and drive long-term business success.
This partnership will further strengthen de Novo's reputation for delivering on its promise to create value for its clients, allowing customers to benefit from the company's vast expertise, in-depth industry knowledge, and proven ability to hand-pick partners who provide the best for their customers.
Ian Carline, Chief Technology Officer at de Novo says,“RoleMapper is a clear market-leader in their field and exactly the type of organisation we look to partner with – organisations that do pioneering work by inventing new approaches to deliver extraordinary results. We look forward to working with the RoleMapper team moving forward and to bringing the benefits of its award-winning technology to our rapidly growing customer base.”
SaraHill, CEO, RoleMapper says: “In a world where organisations are facing significant skills challenges, increasing compliance requirements and continuous organisational transformation, de Novo has clearly identified that current approaches to managing jobs and job data are no longer fit for purpose. We are delighted to be partnering with de Novo to support how customers cleanse, update and manage job data and inclusive job descriptions -the fundamental building blocks of any workforce strategy.”
About de Novo
We are de Novo. The Experience Economy Consultancy. We create data-driven, personalised experiences over standardised business processes for the experience economy, providing organisations with valuable insights into their customers and employees.
It is our unique entrepreneurial background and diverse thinking that fundamentally differentiates ourselves from our competitors. We work across all industries, combining our experience as entrepreneurs, consultants and practitioners to deliver innovation and generate value for our clients through the power of Oracle SaaS Cloud and ServiceNow technologies.
We are a team of innovators, disruptors and straight-talkers, who are not afraid to challenge the status quo in order to support our clients in pioneering change in the fast-moving experience economy.
Excel in the digital world. Experience a different approach. Engage de Novo.
See how we're different: www.de-novo-solutions.com or email: contactdenovo@de-novo-solutions.com
#wearedenovo
About RoleMapper
RoleMapper is an award-winning, AI-powered platform that creates agile, inclusive and skills-based organisations by cleansing, updating and managing their job architecture and job data, as well as creating inclusive job descriptions - the fundamental building blocks of any workforce strategy.
Learn more about us at: www.rolemapper.tech
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.
About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle Partner Network(OPN) is Oracle’s partner program designed to help enable partners to accelerate the transition to cloud and help drive superior customer business outcomes. The OPN program allows partners to engage with Oracle through track(s) aligned to how they go to market: Cloud Build for partners that provide products or services built on or integrated with Oracle Cloud; CloudSell for partners that resell Oracle Cloud technology; Cloud Service for partners that implement, deploy and manage Oracle Cloud Services; and License & Hardware for partners that build, service or sell Oracle software licenses or hardware products. Customers may be able to expedite their business objectives with OPN partners who have achieved Expertise in a product family or cloud service. To learn more visit: https://www.oracle.com/partnernetwork.
Trademarks
ServiceNow are registered trademarks of ServiceNow Inc. and/or its affiliates.
Oracle, Java, and MySQL are registered trademarks ofOracle Corporation.
Contact Info
Michelle Clelland, Marketing Experience Lead, de Novo Solutions
michelle.clelland@de-novo-solutions.com
+44(0) 1633 492 042
Lisa Doherty, Marketing Manager, RoleMapper
lisa.doherty@rolemapper.tech
Role Mapper Technologies Ltd
Kings Wharf, Exeter
United Kingdom
© 2025 RoleMapper. All rights reserved.
