Job Evaluation A Step-by-Step Guide
Soon the EU Pay Transparency Directive will come into force. One change is critical and often overlooked: it is the employer who must prove they pay fairly — not the employee who must prove discrimination. This reversal of the burden of proof changes everything.
Job evaluation is the foundation the entire system rests on. Without it, you have no arguments in a dispute. You cannot show why one person earns more than another, or prove that the difference has nothing to do with gender.
This article walks you through the full process — from your first list of positions to finished pay grades. No consultants, no jargon.
What job evaluation is and why intuition alone isn’t enough
Job evaluation is the assessment of the value of work based on objective criteria. The key point: you are evaluating the position, not the person. It does not matter whether a specific employee has ten years of experience or is brand new — what matters is what the role requires.
The goal is straightforward: determine which positions have similar value to the organisation, and which differ enough to justify different pay ranges. If two people perform work of equal value, they must be paid the same — regardless of gender.
That sounds reasonable. The problem appears when you have 50 positions across a dozen departments and everything has been managed “by gut feeling” or in an Excel file with no methodology behind it. In that situation, you have no way to defend your pay decisions — even if they were fair in practice.
Which criteria to choose
The directive does not prescribe a specific job evaluation method. It only requires that the chosen criteria be:
- objective — based on the requirements of the position, not the characteristics of the person,
- gender-neutral — no criterion may favour typically “male” or “female” roles,
- documented and consistent — the same criteria applied to all positions in the company.
At JobEval, we recommend using the standard developed by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE): four factors and fourteen sub-criteria. It is a ready-made template from the organisation referenced in the directive itself.
A company may define its own criteria from scratch, but it is worth grounding them in the four areas the directive identifies as key:
| Factor | What you assess | Example of difference between positions |
|---|---|---|
| Skills and knowledge | Required education, experience, task complexity | Machine operator vs. Process engineer |
| Responsibility | For people, budget, decisions, data security | Warehouse worker vs. Logistics manager |
| Effort | Physical, mental, concentration, time pressure | Assembly worker vs. Customer complaints specialist |
| Working conditions | Noise, risk, shift work, exposure to hazardous factors | Office worker vs. Production floor operator |
Each factor is assigned a percentage weight — and here you have flexibility. In a manufacturing company, working conditions and physical effort may carry more weight. In a technology company, the emphasis shifts to skills and responsibility for data. What matters is that the weights are justified and uniform across the entire organisation.
Step by step: how to conduct a job evaluation
Step 1 — Build a list of positions
Start with an inventory. Not a list of employees — a list of positions. “CNC Operator” is one position, even if you employ twelve of them. A company with 100–200 employees typically has 20 to 50 unique positions.
Where to look: employment contracts, organisational chart, pay policy, job descriptions if they exist. At this stage you do not need finished descriptions — a list of titles and their department assignments is enough.
Step 2 — Define criteria and weights
Choose your criteria (custom or a ready-made template) and assign weights (each criterion’s percentage contribution to the overall score). Example for a manufacturing company:
- Skills and knowledge: 30%
- Responsibility: 25%
- Effort: 20%
- Working conditions: 25%
Document why you chose these proportions. This document becomes part of your audit trail.
Step 3 — Score each position
Each position is scored on every criterion — for example on a 1–5 scale, where 1 represents minimum requirements and 5 the highest level of complexity or load.
A few rules that limit subjectivity:
- Have at least two people score independently, then compare results.
- Use level descriptions (“level 3 = independent work with supervision required in new situations”).
- Document the justification for every score assigned.
Step 4 — Calculate results and group positions into grades
Sum the weighted scores for each position. You get a ranking — from lowest-value roles to highest. Then divide that ranking into pay grades, typically 5 to 8 groups.
Pay grades are groups of positions with similar value to the organisation,
determined by the results of the evaluation. Each grade corresponds to a
defined pay range. Positions in the same grade have comparable requirements,
responsibilities, and working conditions — meaning the people in them should
be paid within the same range.Each grade gets a pay range. The boundaries between grades should be justified — for example by natural breaks in the scoring, differences in scope of responsibility, or labour market benchmarks.
Step 5 — Check for the gender pay gap
This is the final and critical step. For each pay grade, check: are the average salaries of women and men comparable?
If a difference exists within a grade, it must be explainable by an objective, gender-neutral criterion: longer tenure, higher performance, additional qualifications. If it cannot be explained — that is a gap to be corrected.
Companies with more than 100 employees will be required to report the gender pay gap. But even smaller companies can be challenged by an employee with a claim. Your job evaluation documentation is your first line of defence.
⚠️ Note — audit
The directive does not just say “do a job evaluation”. It says: “prove that you did it and that you did it correctly”.
Every scoring decision must have a justification. Every change to an assessment must be recorded — when, by whom, and why. The entire process must leave a trail that can be reconstructed a year or three years later.
An Excel spreadsheet does not provide this. If you overwrite an old score, the previous version is gone. You do not know who made the change or when. In the event of litigation or an inspection — no documentation means no defence, even if the decisions were fully justified.
A good job evaluation is one you can open three years from now and show an inspector: who scored it, when, which criteria were in effect, what changed, and why.
Example: manufacturing company, 6 positions
Below is a simplified job evaluation example for a manufacturing company. Weights: Skills 30%, Responsibility 25%, Effort 20%, Working Conditions 25%. Scoring scale 1–5.
| Position | Skills | Responsibility | Effort | Working conditions | Weighted score | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CNC Operator | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 3.0 | B |
| Assembly Worker | 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2.6 | A |
| Quality Controller | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2.8 | B |
| Logistics Specialist | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2.6 | A |
| Health & Safety Specialist | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3.1 | C |
| Shift Manager | 4 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3.8 | D |
Grade B contains two positions: CNC Operator and Quality Controller. If women in this grade earn on average 15% less than men — the difference needs to be explained. If it results from a difference in tenure or additional qualifications, you document that. If there is no justification — it is a gap to be corrected.
Three mistakes that most often undermine a job evaluation
Evaluating the person instead of the position. “But Smith has been with us for ten years and knows every machine” — that is an argument for setting pay within a grade, not for assigning the position to a higher grade. If Smith’s role and Jones’s role have the same requirements, they belong in the same grade.
No documentation of scoring justifications. You have a table of scores, but no longer remember why the CNC Operator got 4 points for working conditions and the Assembly Worker got 3. A year from now nobody will be able to reconstruct it. See: the audit callout above.
Different criteria for different departments. “We evaluate production differently from administration.” That is understandable intuitively, but it violates the consistency principle. You cannot compare positions across departments if you scored them by different rules.
What next
Job evaluation is not a one-time project. Roles change, new positions are created, scopes of responsibility shift. Each time, the assessment needs to be updated and the change documented.
Done manually in Excel, that means weeks of work from scratch with every update. JobEval guides you through each of the steps described above with a built-in methodology and automatic audit trail. You can start from a list of positions and end with a finished report — in a matter of days.
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