pay grade evaluation

August 22, 2007 8:48 PM

Educate me on this one - how does HR evaluate and adjust employee pay grades?

Shortly after my boss was fired, I found out that my job description was not up to date and did not capture all of my responsibilities. I brought this issue up to HR, and HR agreed to review my own summary of job responsibilities. Regardless of the outcome, it won't make any difference to my salary for this year (I already got a raise). However, it may adjust my pay grade. I'm already near the border line.

The updated job description will be fed into a program that will evaluate my true grade. I'm not good at selling myself, not to mention writing my own job description. It makes me nervous that my own writing may not be professional enough to reflect a true grade that I deserve. What exactly is HR looking for in terms of pay grade evaluation? Is the program looking for those power keywords?

posted by dy to work & money (2 comments total)

What exactly is HR looking for in terms of pay grade evaluation? Is the program looking for those power keywords?

Talk to your new boss. HR's job is to ensure that the company is not paying much above industry/sector average for a given job function, at the macro level. Management's job is to ensure that they have top talent organized into high performance teams. HR will try to pay you as little as you might be worth. A good boss will try to pay you as much as you are worth.

Your opinion doesn't matter much, unless you are objectively grossly underpaid (as seems to be the case here). Start working on a good relationship with your new boss now.

Also, be very careful writing your new job description. The degree to which your writing looks professional is completely irrelevant, unless you write like a third grader (which you don't). The greatest danger is that you will over commit yourself now, and fail to achieve your goals next year. Talk to your boss about the minimum requirements for the next pay grade up. Represent that you meet those requirements, even if you are doing the work of someone two pay-grades higher.
posted by b1tr0t at 9:45 PM on August 22, 2007

Often in this situation, HR would have you fill out a standardized Job Information Questionnaire (JIQ) that would just collect the facts of your duties and shouldn't be impacted too much by your self-promotional or writing skills. Some places will send the completed JIQ along with an updated Job Description to an external compensation consultant, who is theoretically above the political fray of the organization and likelt to give them a more accurate and balanced suggested grade for the position, which HR people usually want, because incorrect or politicized grading can lead to exposure, and minimizing exposure is really HR's number one job.

You might ask if this is the process, depending on how much of a rabble-rouser you want to be. Good HR people should consider this the right practice, so your asking about it may provoke something depending on the size and inertia of the organization. On the other hand, you don't want HR to think that you're poking around the process looking for exposure. On the gripping hand, if this is the private sector, they're essentially going to do what they want to do and will massage the process to provide both the desired result and minimize exposure. That's probably why they use a program that they can 'configure' to their liking.

When you revise your job description or fill out a JIQ, there's two sides to that, too. You want to be as honest as possible (although a little boasting here and there is common), especially when it comes to telling other employees to do things or being responsible for decisions; those are the primary vectors that move you up the scale, moreso than knowledge or workload. However, if HR and execs have one image of the org chart in their head, and what you write on your JIQ or description reflects a different reality than the one they were expecting, that may not go over well and could ally forces against the regrading. On the flip side, with a boss recently fired and replaced, it's much easier to blame anything amiss on them.

If I were writing an abstract position grading program, I'd score up for supervise, coordinate, determine, independent, manage, develop, organize, inform, collaborate, plan, sole, primary, single, main, critical, and core.

I'd grade down for implement, ensure, part of, alongside, report, conjunction, serve, together, deliver, upon request, etc. etc.

That's all pulled out of my ass though. If this is a big company, that program may be well honed and looking for jargon and specific keyphrases that none of us would be able to anticipate.

Good luck! Hope this helps.
posted by ulotrichous at 10:20 PM on August 22, 2007 [2 favorites]