Sixty job titles into nine grades without a consultant: notes from a small manufacturer

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.