Value the job, not the person
Job evaluation ranks positions by contribution: scope of decision, technical complexity, economic impact, and relationship with third parties. It's an uncomfortable exercise because it separates the value of the job from the performance of whoever currently holds it, but it's the only basis on which a consistent pay scale can be built.
Families and levels before money
Grouping positions into families — commercial, operations, technology, support — and defining levels within each one allows comparison against the right market and opens career paths that don't depend on managing people.
- Families by the nature of the work, not by org-chart area
- Levels with explicit advancement criteria
- Technical and management tracks with level equivalence
- Standardized descriptions to allow market comparison
The band is a policy decision
The width of the band and the target percentile are strategic decisions: pay at the median where talent is substitutable, and above it where talent is scarce. Making that explicit prevents actual policy from becoming the byproduct of individual negotiations.
Key takeaways
- Job evaluation measures the position, not the incumbent.
- Families and levels must exist before any pay scale.
- The target percentile is decided by talent scarcity, not by area.
NS frameworks and reference sources
- Proprietary NS framework · RA·NS — methodological notes from the Compensation and Performance practice
- NS project base: anonymized cases by sector and geography
- Open market evidence and academic literature, recalibrated with client data
- WTW (Willis Towers Watson) — Salary Budget Planning Report
- OECD — Gender Wage Gap statistics
- Mercer — Global Talent Trends / Total Rewards
This article develops proprietary NS Business Strategy frameworks, drawing on our project base and on public industry literature and studies cited above. Figures are reference ranges; each project is measured against the client's actual data.