Elif Lindqvist· Director of Benefits, Bellwether Consulting
Posted in Compensation ·
We are a family-owned precision components maker in the English Midlands with 310 employees. Until last year there were 60 job titles and no structure at all. I am the HR manager and reward is one part of the job.
What we did: wrote half-page profiles for every job, ranked them in a two-day workshop with six managers using paired comparison, then found the natural breaks, which gave nine grades. We priced 22 of the jobs from one regional survey and set ranges of 85–115% around those.
It took four months of part-time work. The ranking workshop was the most valuable part, because managers argued it out themselves and now defend the result. The weakest part is the market data for the top two grades.
4 insightful · 2 agree · 1 reply · 50 views · 4 following
Rosa BauerWWP, GRS
Head of Reward, Pinehurst Foods
This is close to what I did at a 400-person food business, and paired comparison is underrated for small organisations. One thing to add for next year: keep a short written note of why each close call went the way it did. When a new manager challenges a grade in 18 months, the workshop memory will have gone.
