Use of market data for pricing jobs has become a very common practice. To attract and retain qualified applicants, employers must ensure that their compensation practice is competitive with the current market. One issue concerning compensation professionals is ensuring that organizational job titles are comparable to the job titles found in compensation surveys. This tool should assist with this problem.

 

The Job Title and Characteristics Tool is comprised of key terminology used both in salary surveys and job descriptions. It should be noted, however, that this is only a template-style tool for review. Each organization has its own business needs; therefore, this tool should be used as a guideline, not a steadfast rule.

 

In development of this tool, several salary survey descriptions, generic job description books and practitioner experiences were used. The common terms and definitions were compiled from these sources, and the Job Title Characteristics were formed from this information.

 

A key concern with market pricing is job titling — ensuring the definition of a job is the same as the surveys being used. A job title is defined as “a descriptive name for the total collection of tasks, duties and responsibilities assigned to one or more individuals whose positions have the same level.” Job titles should describe the nature and level of work performed. For the purposes of this tool, the total idea of a job and its responsibilities has been broken into five types of jobs:

(1) Support staff

(2) Professional

(3) Supervisory

(4) Managerial

(5) Executive

 

It is understood that the entire job as a whole might fall into a few of these categories but, for the sake of this tool, each job has been slotted into the “best fit” match.

 

Users will find a brief description of each job title, responsibilities, reporting requirements, exemption status, job knowledge and examples of each job title. There also is an organizational chart showing reporting requirements and organizational structure.