Author: Jason Smith
Today's HR leaders juggle a hybrid workforce, complex pay transparency laws and rising employee expectations for career growth opportunities. Job architecture provides a clear, defensible framework that benefits both employers and employees. The structure aligns jobs with organizational goals and ensures clarity, consistency and equity across the workforce.
Career pathways can help retain talent
One of the key benefits of job architecture is its ability to provide employees with career pathways, which are crucial for retaining top talent. Without clear opportunities for growth, employees often leave to advance their careers elsewhere. Leaving a company isn't due to a tendency to job-hop but rather a lack of internal pathways for advancement. Few employees stay with one organization throughout their careers unless they see a way forward.
What is job architecture?
A job architecture framework organizes roles within an organization. It typically includes job family groups, job levels, titles and attributes required for effective performance. This framework creates compensation profiles and identifies career paths, showing employees how they can progress within the organization. Effective job architecture ensures clarity, consistency and equity, making it a vital tool for talent management.
Top 3 job architecture missteps
Organizations often make similar mistakes when designing job architecture. The most common include title inflation, insufficient career ladders and inconsistent title conventions.
1. Title Inflation
At Gallagher, we see title inflation as among the most frequent missteps in job architecture. Especially small- to mid-sized organizations may use inflated titles to attract talent or reward employees without impacting budgets. While "titles are free," the long-term costs can be significant.
Wage transparency exposes leveling inconsistencies and title inflation amplifies inequities. Such amplification can drive disengagement when employees notice peers at higher levels despite comparable scope and span of control.
Conversely, an individual contributor with the title of chief financial officer making $120,000 with one direct report in an organization of 100 employees may expect higher pay than their responsibilities warrant, or they may explore external opportunities only to find that they don't meet the requirements of a chief financial officer at a larger organization.
Further, inconsistently inflated titles make it difficult for the HR team to compare roles internally, accurately benchmark roles and design meaningful, transparent career paths.
2. Insufficient career ladders
Career ladders outline structured pathways for employee advancement within a functional area, defining the skills and steps required for progression. These pathways enable HR to differentiate and reward talent, identify skill development needs, manage pay bands and plan for succession.
However, designing career ladders is time intensive, especially for organizations with understaffed HR teams. Small HR teams frequently find themselves overwhelmed and building career ladders requires time to think through the criteria for each job.
Career ladders vary significantly across job families and functions, such as finance, IT and marketing. For example, a company may employ 200 account executives, but their attributes and compensation plans may differ. For that reason, an account executive job ladder will differ markedly from that of a financial analyst.
Without structured pathways, employees may feel stagnant and look elsewhere for growth opportunities — particularly in small companies, where employees may feel that advancement depends on someone leaving.
3. Inconsistent titling conventions
In the absence of clear guidelines for creating titles tied to job levels, titles can become arbitrary, negatively impacting organizational structure, culture and reputation. Even minor inconsistencies, such as punctuation or formatting, can affect data integrity, making it harder to run reports and conduct workforce analytics.
Similar to title inflation, arbitrary titles can impact employee retention and morale due to unclear career paths, inflating budgets through inappropriate pay increases and eroding employee morale.
To create consistent title conventions, consider the following:
- Keep titles short and simple.
- Use a consistent format.
- Avoid assigning management titles to individual contributors. Exceptions may include managers who independently lead or manage a function.
- Ensure management level titles align with clearly defined span of control criteria.
- Avoid abbreviations or company-specific references.
The cost of doing nothing
While designing job architecture may seem overwhelming — especially during rapid growth or a merger — neglecting this structure can harm employee satisfaction and ultimately, talent attraction and retention. A strong job architecture fosters transparency and equity, helping employees understand their roles and opportunities for growth within the organization.
For resource-conscious organizations, Gallagher recommends a phased approach to job architecture design to limit disruption and build internal support.
A seasoned Gallagher compensation professional with real-world experience can help you navigate your job architecture journey.
