Building Job Architecture for Strategic Growth

What is Job Architecture

A job architecture is a structured framework that defines how roles relate to each other based on scope, complexity, and required capability. It enables consistent decisions around compensation, hiring, and development by grouping roles into job families and levels that reflect business needs, independent of employees.

Why Implement a Job Architecture

Job architecture provides the consistency and structure required to make high-quality, scalable talent decisions. It enables companies to align roles with the business strategy, reduce risk, and support equitable and efficient people practices.

Here’s what a well-designed job architecture unlocks:

Compensation Accuracy & Pay Equity

• Create role-based pay targets that reflect scope, complexity, and market demand—rather than candidate negotiation or internal politics.
• Reduce risk of pay disparities and support compliance with pay transparency and equal pay regulations.
• Build trust by ensuring that similar roles are compensated consistently across teams and locations.
  

Faster, More Defensible People Decisions

• Establish a clear framework for hiring, promotions, and exits, enabling faster decisions grounded in job responsibilities and expectations.
• Reduce legal and reputational risk by standardizing titles, leveling, and pay across departments.
  
• Prevent decision-making bottlenecks and inconsistencies that stem from role ambiguity or manager subjectivity.
  

Internal Mobility and Career Progression

• Help employees understand how they can grow, whether that means advancing in their role or moving horizontally across functions.
• Support development planning by tying job levels to observable skills and capabilities.
• Retain top performers with visible, equitable pathways for advancement.
  

Strategic Workforce Planning

• Identify current and future skill needs aligned to business goals.
• Improve budgeting and headcount forecasting by grounding plans in consistent role definitions and market benchmarks.
• Enable long-term talent strategy and reduce the cost of reactive hiring or misaligned headcount growth.

When and How to Implement a Job Architecture

When to Implement a Job Architecture

Job architecture can and should begin early and evolve with your company’s growth. Earlier-stage businesses benefit from lightweight structure to prevent future remediation, while growth and mature companies require more defined systems to support complexity, scale, and compliance.

You don’t need to wait for dozens of roles. If you’re making strategic compensation or performance decisions, you need job architecture.

To Build an Effective Job Architecture, You’ll Need

1. A compensation survey (e.g., Radford, Mercer, and Culpepper) that includes leveling guidance and market-aligned job descriptions. Choosing the right survey for you involves many decisions.
2. Internal job descriptions that define the primary responsibilities of each role.
3. A role-based mindset—focus on the job itself, not the individual employee performance or tenure.
   

How to Implement a Job Architecture

The section below illustrates how job architectures may differ by maturity phase. Next, we provide step-by-step instructions for creating your job architecture.

Startup

‍Lay the Foundation for Strategic Hiring and Pay

Common Structure: Organization has a few roles that straddle multiple areas of responsibility; roles can be ambiguous. HR is tactical and the HR organization is flat.

Maturity Benchmark: Organization hires and pays effectively.

Biggest Risks: Organization makes bad hires, retains poor performers, and pay is not aligned with the market.

Job Architecture Purpose and Creation: Document responsibilities and match to market roles Clarify titles and pay for current and future roles Use role clarity to guide early performance needs.

Strategic Advantage: Prevent long-term misalignment and pay inequity.

Growth

Enable Scalable, Consistent Talent Decisions

Common Structure: Roles, clarity, and management layers grow, while HR owners and strategies form.

Maturity Benchmark: Organization shapes employee performance. Associated legal risk are reduced.

Biggest Risks: Poor, unmotivated performers remain in roles, while the organization makes legally indefensible employment decisions.

Job Architecture Purpose and Creation: Level and consolidate roles using survey benchmarks, Align expectations across similar roles, Connect leveling to performance and development.

Strategic Advantage: Prevent long-term misalignment and pay inequity.

Mature

Drive Strategy Through Role and Career Infrastructure

Common Structure: Various, well-defined roles and managers come into place, while HR aligns strategy and practice.

Maturity Benchmark: Organization retains top talent. Associated legal risks are reduced.

Biggest Risks: High levels of attrition, while your organization makes legally indefensible employment decisions.

Job Architecture Purpose and Creation: Validate leveling with job analysis. Align job families across functions. Link architecture to comp, org design, and succession

Strategic Advantage: Improve agility, equity, and talent retention.

Job Architecture

Step-by-step

1. Select and Review Your Market Survey: Choose a compensation survey that aligns with your industry, company size, and stage of growth. Review the leveling guide and job descriptions included in the survey. This will become your external framework for mapping roles and setting pay targets.
2. Map Internal Roles to Market Survey Roles: For each company role (not employee), identify the survey role whose responsibilities overlap by at least 70%. Focus on the actual duties—not the job titles. This ensures meaningful, defensible comparisons and helps eliminate internal title inflation or inconsistency.
3. Group Roles into Job Families: Organize your roles based on discipline, skillset, and function (e.g., Finance, Marketing, Engineering)— not by who reports to whom. Remember: job architecture reflects what work is done, not how your org chart is structured.
4. Level your roles: Use your survey’s leveling guide to assign each role to the appropriate job level based on required experience, scope, and complexity. Don’t base levels on salary or tenure—use consistent criteria to ensure internal equity and legal defensibility.
5. Validate Internal Titles and Leveling: Compare your internal job titles and levels to the market-mapped equivalents. Look for misalignments where roles may be under- or overstated. Adjust as needed to support consistency, pay transparency, and career path clarity.
6. Set Pay and Equity Targets: Use your architecture to define salary ranges, bonus structures, and equity targets for each role and level. This structure supports consistent and market-aligned decisions during hiring, promotions, and merit cycles.
7. Apply Your Architecture to Key Talent Decisions: Once complete, use your job architecture to guide workforce planning, performance evaluations, promotion decisions, and compensation adjustments. A well-structured architecture becomes the foundation for scalable, compliant, and strategic HR practices.

Elevating Your HR Practice

Is a Job Architecture an area of opportunity for your business?

Whether you are building a compensation strategy, preparing for growth, or improving performance practices, a strong job architecture is foundational.

Need support?

Contact us at support@alotten.com.

Resources

If you want to learn more about job architecture and related topics, we have curated a set of articles that provide valuable insights and perspectives.

‍Job Architecture 

Deloitte Why Jobs Still Matter: Evolving Job Architecture 

Mercer Global Job Architecture Pulse Survey Report  

CompTool Job Architecture Project Plan 

Pay disparities  

HBR How to Identify—and Fix—Pay Inequality at Your Company 

Pay analyses 

Academy to Innovate HR A Guide to Compensation Analysis 

Work / Job Analysis and Legally defensible, reliable employment decisions

‍Schwabe Drafting Legally Sound Job Descriptions