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RoleMapper’s job data transformation and management platform puts local authorities back in control of their HR challenges.

Centralising job data

Centralising job data is critical for effective governance and robust risk management in local government. Without this, there are challenges associated with outdated or inaccurate job information. 

  • Time: Manual job and data clean-up can take between 18-24 months
  • Cost: It can cost over £250k per annum to manually update jobs, and over £1m+ in consulting support to cleanse a job architecture
  • Legal Risk: UK councils have incurred £2.8 billion in equal pay fines
  • Workforce planning: 80% of organisations struggle to make progress on their workforce planning goals

RoleMapper understands our challenges and has the ability to fast-track the whole digitisation process, it’s why we appointed them to work with us.

Collecting thousands of different job descriptions, centralising them and then facilitating their review and updating by multiple parties together, has been transformative for the council.

Programme Manager, Birmingham City Council

Benefits to using RoleMapper

There are numerous benefits to using RoleMapper. Learn more about how we can help transform your job data, reduce costs and improve recruitment and retention.

Many Councils are facing a rising tide of pay equity claims, with recent cases highlighting inadequate record keeping and lack of governance as critical issues.

The root causes of these challenges are multifaceted:

  • A lack of central governance has led to inconsistent processes and templates across departments, complicating equal pay analysis and increasing the risk of claims 
  • The absence of centralised storage prevents regular job reviews and updates, which are crucial for maintaining accurate pay equity comparators 
  • Furthermore, manual review processes and poor version control create significant challenges in tracking changes and maintaining audit trails, potentially exposing local authorities to legal risks.

These systemic issues collectively contribute to the growing vulnerability of Councils to pay equity claims and underscore the urgent need for improved job management practices.

As part of the 1997 Single Status Agreement, Councils in the U.K. made a commitment to undertake a review of all jobs each Council every five years  This commitment is still outstanding and has resulted in: 
  • Job descriptions and person specifications in most cases being out of date 
  • Job descriptions being used for recruitment which do not accurately describe the current role 
  • Employees being ‘job matched’ to jobs which are not reflective of their current roles 
  • The risk of equal pay claims 
Many Councils now need to refresh and update a considerable proportion of their job descriptions, and this is emerging as a significant piece of work, even, given the potential scale of the undertaking, a separate programme in of itself.

Digital transformation is the key to increasing efficiency, reducing workloads, and streamlining data-driven insights at Councils, however: 

  • Many processes are still mainly manual and decentralised which makes it difficult to extract meaningful data to drive change 
  • The existing tech infrastructure often consists of fragmented systems that are not connected to each other 
  • Skills gaps exist across Councils – it is difficult to attract and retain employees with the required technical knowledge or expertise to enable digital transformation 
  • Data challenges include limited data visibility, sharing, access, and availability, as well as data security and privacy concerns

Eliminating unnecessary paper-based services and processes could save over £1 billion by 2025, according to the UK government.

Councils need to urgently look at ways to encourage self-service, both from an end user and employee perspective. 

How job descriptions are designed impacts recruitment and inclusion. A key issue in recruitment for Councils is competing with private sector salaries and comparable job attractiveness – having poor job descriptions potentially restricts the candidate pool which will compound this issue. Councils need to put more emphasis on how the overall responsibilities of a role are defined. What the role holder must do - and take ownership for - has a major impact on how attractive the job is for prospective candidates. 

Complexity is a real barrier to inclusion:  

  • Many people find it hard to see how their experience and skills can transfer to fulfil an overly long wish-list of deliverables and attributes 
  • If there are too many responsibilities, or if they are overly complex, research has shown that it will highly likely put people off applying 
  • If sentences are too long, there is evidence to suggest that people find them difficult to read and will not engage

Current approaches to job description creation in Councils are usually offline, pen & paper exercises and focused in organisational silos. This results in verbose and convoluted job descriptions, perpetuating inequalities, creating potential barriers to inclusion, and deterring high-calibre candidates

  • Current job descriptions and job evaluation processes in Councils can be a hindrance to this organisational agility  
  • One key challenge for Councils are skills gaps to meet future service needs. However, with out-of-date and inaccessible job descriptions, it is difficult to understand current vs. future skills requirements and for learning and development teams to plan for these  
  • Both job description and job evaluation processes take a significant amount of manager time and result in delays to recruitment and organisational changes  
  • Managing job description updates within organisational refocus and ‘one organisation’ integration approaches is currently challenging and delays the implementation of changes 
  • Current processes for job descriptions are often manual, inconsistent, biased and time/resource intensive – it can take a manager up to half a day to create a job description from scratch
  • There can be significant issues with both quality, accuracy and auditing of job descriptions that pose a significant risk to issues with equal pay claims 
  • Inaccurate job descriptions can lead to inaccuracies in job evaluation and open Councils up to risk of claims   
  • Low quality job descriptions result in considerable investment of time and significant delays​ to the job evaluation process - it can take 2-3 weeks for an evaluation to be completed 
  • The process takes a significant amount of manager time and results in delays in recruitment and organisational changes 
  • There is often little capacity in the team conducting job evaluations resulting in a backlog of requirements and lengthy delays  
  • Low quality job descriptions impact the ability to attract and recruit talent externally​  
  • There is often no mechanism to de-bias, build inclusion and ensure accuracy of skills requirements in job descriptions, resulting in jobs that are biased, block diverse candidates and put us at risk of potential inequality claims   
  • There is no centralised filing system for job descriptions, so time is wasted finding the correct job description  
  • There is no ability to easily view and analyse all job descriptions across a Council for equal work for equal pay 
  • Job descriptions are reviewed manually via email, it is challenging to keep track of changes  
  • There is no mechanism to capture an audit trail of changes to job descriptions as the roles evolve 
  • It is often unclear which is the latest version, leaving the Council open to potential risk​ of claims  
  • Managing job description updates with organisational re-structures is challenging and delays the implementation of changes ​ 
  • There are multiple versions of job descriptions for the same role 
  • Inconsistencies in how jobs are described make it challenging to build out consistent career paths 

RoleMapper Features

AI-powered data processing to rapidly digitise, standardise, and cleanse existing job descriptions.

Centralised intelligent database to efficiently manage, standardise, and govern job descriptions.

AI-powered content writing features fast-track job description creation and ensures consistency, quality, and accuracy.

An inclusive job design foundation ensures JDs are de-biased and designed with inclusion.

Automated workflows and collaboration to automate and streamline job description review and job evaluation processes.

The audit trail feature helps manage and track changes, tracking both user changes within the document and changes to versions over time.

Dashboards and governance features help govern the quality, scope and accuracy of jobs and enable comparison across job descriptions to assess equal work for equal pay.

Audit trails, dashboards and reporting help govern job creation and changes, provide increased visibility of equal pay for equal work, and reduce risk of pay equity claims.   

The recruitment module provides the ability to rapidly generate best practice inclusive job adverts to support efficient, inclusive recruitment.

Job Architecture module and AI-powered data processing to automate and fast-track a transition to job families.   

Definitions

Know your job profiles from your job descriptions.

A job profile provides a broad, generic overview of a role for organisational planning and reward strategies, while a job description offers a more tailored outline of a role for hiring, performance management, and day-to-day guidance for employees.

Find out more
What is job levelling?

What is job levelling and why is it important?

Job levelling is a systematic process that HR teams use to define and compare job roles within an organisation. It’s often referred to as job evaluation or job classification.
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