In the 21st century, global connectivity and remote work are reshaping the relationship between organizations and employees. Workers seek greater transparency and ownership, while companies aim to better predict which skills will soon be in demand to secure the top talent for themselves.
As a hiring professional, how can you strike a balance between both? There are a few recruiting techniques and tools you can employ in situations like this, but for this specific issue, we’d recommend creating a job architecture.
Job architecture is a strategic framework used to define job roles within an organization. Think of it as your ultimate organizational map, which illustrates the path toward career progression for individuals and helps organizations perform better skills gap analyses and succession planning.
Never used a job architecture before? We’re about to explain in more detail how you can build your first job architecture framework, how it can benefit you, and how you can evaluate its effectiveness over time.
TL;DR — Key Takeaways
Job architecture is a framework for achieving organizational structure. It helps you do things like define roles, identify skills gaps, and determine compensation packages.
A well-executed job architecture makes it easier to attract top talent, fosters a culture of continuous learning and growth, clearly outlines career progression, and enables effective talent management.
Building a successful job architecture involves creating job descriptions, assigning titles, and categorizing the titles into job families, functions, and levels into a cohesive job hierarchy.
Monitor the efficacy of your job architecture by regularly evaluating metrics like time-to-fill, quality of hire, and employee performance.
What is job architecture?
Job architecture is a framework used to structure job roles, responsibilities, and career pathways within an organization. It helps everyone see all the roles within the company and how they fall on a job hierarchy.
When done well, it provides guidance on employee development, compensation strategies, and performance management. While small businesses can use it as they build their teams (especially if they’re doing so quickly), it’s especially useful at larger companies to help standardize job titles and pay across different job families.
Speaking of job families…job architecture helps with strategic workforce planning by zooming out and considering all the roles in a job family. When you can see them clearly laid out, it is easier to identify gaps or anticipate pockets of team growth.
Top tip:
This structured approach ensures consistency, fairness, and transparency in HR practices while staying aligned with overall company goals. It’s so easy to lose sight of this when you’re tangled up in the day-to-day of your job, and job architecture can act as a guide to ensure you’re always on the right track.
What are the components of a job architecture?
Job levels
Think of job levels like levels in a video game. They help organize different roles into a hierarchical structure, with higher levels denoting more complexity, responsibility, and skills.
Different job levels have different criteria, such as decision-making authority, scope of impact, and educational requirements. Pegging compensation to job levels ensures a fair and transparent approach to pay equity and HR practices. Plus, employees can clearly understand what’s needed next from them to progress.
Top tip:
Job leveling provides a clear pathway for career progression and internal equity.
Job documentation
While it might sound similar, job documentation is less detailed than a job description. It’s a record of expectations, job functions, and entry requirements of each role in the organization.
Outlining job responsibilities, required qualifications, performance expectations, and reporting relationships in job documentation helps hiring managers identify the right candidates. It also helps evaluate employee performance by highlighting areas where people might need extra training.
Top tip:
Keeping a thorough record of job documentation can help promote internal equity through transparency around compensation decisions.
Job titles
Standardizing job titles in a company is akin to creating a common language—it helps everyone know what kind of level and skill set you’re talking about off the bat. By creating organizational structure through job titles, it’s easier for people to instantly know who is at which level.
They also help with internal communication, as employees always know how those around them relate to their position in the job hierarchy. Job titles also indirectly support the concept of career paths and progression, often referred to as “climbing the corporate ladder.”
Top tip:
Job titles enhance clarity in recruitment, whereas descriptive job titles help candidates understand job expectations better.
Compensation solutions
With different job levels and titles come different compensation packages. While that’s obvious, many companies forget to standardize it, and they end up with employees who are similar in seniority and roles receiving very different pay—an issue that’s horrible for employee morale.
Building standardized compensation solutions into your job architecture helps align pay with job responsibilities in an equitable way. Compensation should always reflect both the internal and external value of each role across the whole organization.
Competitive compensation structures will also help you attract and retain top talent more easily. By clearly categorizing roles based on complexity and responsibility, organizations can implement equitable pay practices that comply with industry standards.
Top tip:
This systematic approach to pay not only builds employee trust but also enhances overall organizational performance by aligning compensation solutions with business objectives and workforce planning needs.
Benefits of job architecture
A well-structured job architecture improves operational efficiency and boosts employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention simultaneously. Below, we’ll examine some specific benefits to see exactly how job architecture achieves this.
Support talent acquisition efforts
Clear role definitions and requirements make talent acquisition easier and more efficient.
Potential candidates who are a good match will naturally gravitate to a job posting that clearly outlines the skills and responsibilities required. More best-match candidates mean you need fewer to find your next hire, leading to a more productive hiring process.
And what’s one of the best ways to get to precise job descriptions? You guessed it—by first building out a solid job architecture.
Improve role clarity
It has been well-documented that role ambiguity leads to burnout due to job dissatisfaction. Job architecture is a great way to prevent this, as it forces you to define roles and responsibilities with precision, crafting an unambiguous job structure.
This helps employee engagement, and ensures they understand their duties, role, and the career paths available to them.
Help identify and fill talent gaps
A well-thought-out job architecture can help identify and fill both current and future skills gaps, something 83% of companies struggle with.
Assessing current capabilities: Use the job architecture to establish a skills inventory across your workforce. Clearly outline the skills needed for each role and assess your employees’ existing capabilities to find skills gaps.
Forecasting future needs: By considering factors such as market shifts, technological advancements, and changing customer demands, you can use your job architecture to design future job roles and anticipate the skills that will be critical for success. This foresight promotes proactive workforce planning and targeted talent acquisition strategies.
Supports and strengthens compensation structures
Job architecture is the cornerstone of an organization’s compensation strategy. It helps make your organization competitive in the wider market while providing your employees with transparency in pay practices—something 67% said they wanted more of.
Categorizing roles based on complexity, responsibility, and required skills establishes a clear hierarchy that facilitates consistent and fair compensation decisions. It also helps with overall morale, as employees understand the factors influencing their compensation. They also know what the next steps they need to take if they wish to earn a promotion.
Facilitate talent development
Job architecture lays out the path to career progress. By categorizing jobs into levels and families, you’re able to provide your talent with a crystal clear career framework to follow should they wish to upskill or progress.
70% of employees say learning improves their sense of connection to a workplace. If you want to boost retention, investing in building a culture of continuous learning and growth seems to be one of the best ways. And going through a job architecture journey will force you to do that by laying out a clear career progression path for all.
How to set up job architecture in 6 steps
Before we dive into the how, it’s important to know that setting up a job architecture requires careful planning and execution. You need to be sure the framework aligns well with organizational goals and effectively supports HR functions while being systematic and fair to all employees.
Here’s the run-down of how we’d do it if we had to start from scratch:
1. Define organizational goals and objectives
It’s important you align job architecture with the organization’s goals and objectives. To do so, you must know what these goals actually are.
Are you aiming to find product-market fit, scale revenue, or enter a new market? Do you anticipate your team growing rapidly in the next six to 12 months, or are you in more of a stagnant phase?
Top tip:
The ship you build depends on where you want to go. So figure that out first before you start designing specific job roles.
2. Conduct a job analysis
Perform a job analysis to better understand what your people actually do. Gather information about their current roles, responsibilities, and qualifications, as well as how they spend their time at work.
Job evaluations like this help you understand what roles are already accounted for and what might be missing from your arsenal.
Top tip:
To do this, you can use surveys, interviews, or pure observation. Whichever method you use, be sure your approach is fair and standardized to avoid manipulating or biasing the data.
3. Develop job descriptions
Now that you know what kind of roles you need from your analysis, it’s time to develop the job descriptions themselves. There are a few different ingredients that are important to include in a killer job description:
Job title: Start with a clear and concise job title that accurately reflects the role. Use standard industry nomenclature to avoid confusion and enhance searchability.
Company description: Provide a brief overview of your company, including its mission, culture, and unique attributes. This will help candidates understand you and what you stand for.
Summary paragraph: Write a short summary that outlines the primary purpose of the role, key responsibilities, and how it fits within the wider job family.
List of responsibilities: This is where you share what the day-to-day work looks like. List seven to ten key tasks in order of importance.
Qualifications: Briefly specify the required and preferred qualifications you’re looking for, including education, experience, and specific skills.
Performance expectations: Clearly outline performance metrics and expectations for the role, so candidates have some insight into how they will be evaluated.
Reporting structure: Mention who your candidate will report to and work closest with. This establishes their position in the organizational structure and hierarchy.
4. Establish job levels and titles
Categorize job titles into job functions, families, and levels.
Job levels describe how much complexity, accountability, and leadership a given role possesses. Common ways to label these are entry-level, mid-level, senior-level, and executive.
Job functions are like departments; they describe broad categories of work, such as finance, marketing, or operations. This helps group similar roles together.
Job families are a bit more specific. For example, within the marketing function, you might have social media, organic, and paid ads families. You can get even more specific with sub-families if your organization is big enough.
Job titles are descriptive and outline an individual’s contribution to the organization. They’re crucial for maintaining organizational clarity. As mentioned earlier, they facilitate internal communication, support career progression, and enhance recruitment.
Top tip:
Let’s say you’re hiring for a designer. A this point in the process, you should be able to identify that you don’t just need a graphic designer, you need a mid-level graphic designer and animator to sit within your visual identity job family, within the creative job function.
5. Design compensation structures
Assessing market data is the best way to align compensation with job levels and titles. This helps you develop fair and competitive salary ranges, benefits, and incentives.
Evaluate job responsibilities, required skills, and industry benchmarks to ensure that compensation fairly reflects the value of each role.
6. Implement and communicate
Building the actual job architecture framework is one thing—making sure everyone knows about it is a whole other ballgame. For maximum efficacy, you’ll need to train managers on its principles and educate employees about its purpose.
Top tip:
There are a few ways to do this. Try starting with regular webinars, quizzes, or routine performance reviews. Keep the lines of communication open. Two-way feedback will help keep the architecture as up-to-date and accurate as possible.
How to measure your job architecture efforts
As we said, none of this really matters if it isn’t ultimately supporting your business goals. So how do you know your job architecture is working? 👇
Monitor recruitment metrics
Keep an eye on key recruitment metrics to help you understand the impact this job architecture has on your hiring process. If you want to ensure you’re attracting and selecting the right talent, these are the vital signs you gotta keep an eye on.
Time-to-fill measures your hiring efficiency—how long it took you to fill a role.
Quality of hire evaluates the performance and retention of new employees.
Candidate satisfaction provides insights into the overall experience and perception of the organization.
By monitoring these metrics, organizations can run health checks on their job architecture and identify areas for improvement as needed.
Top tip:
We suggest organizing your recruiting metrics in one place for a more holistic overview of what’s moving the needle. Depending on the hiring software you’re using, you might be able to rely on its recruitment analytics.
If you’d rather have a more comprehensive overview, though, use our free recruiting metrics spreadsheet!
Evaluate employee performance
Another way to determine if you’ve built an effective job architecture is via employee performance evaluations. Regular performance reviews and feedback from managers and peers provide valuable insights into how well employees are meeting expectations.
This data helps identify areas where job architecture may need refinement to better support employee development and organizational goals.
Analyze compensation equity
Regularly reviewing compensation is essential for maintaining internal equity and market competitiveness, which in turn drives employee retention and engagement.
Some great ways to evaluate this are conducting salary audits to identify inconsistencies, benchmarking against industry standards, and analyzing employee performance data.
Top tip:
Don’t just monitor and analyze. Be willing to actually make necessary adjustments in light of new findings, such as salary increases or reclassifying job roles. The aim is to always offer a fair compensation structure that promotes employee satisfaction, performance and engagement.
Assess career development progression
If you struggling with managing this entire process from start to finish (it’s a lot of work, we know), implement performance management systems to keep track of individual achievements.
You can measure the effectiveness of your development programs by looking into retention rates, employee satisfaction surveys, and skill acquisition metrics (Toggl Hire skills tests can help with the latter!).
Don’t overlook qualitative feedback, either. Listen to what employees are saying regarding their career experiences, too. By evaluating these factors, you can refine your organization’s development programs to better support employee growth, enhance engagement, and improve retention rates.
Hone in on the right skills with Toggl Hire
One of the best ways to complement your journey of building a job architecture is to leverage skills testing to assess candidates based on their abilities and fit for a role. This leads to more informed hiring decisions, reducing the risk of misfires and improving overall employee retention.
This is simple with Toggl Hire, which you can also use to automate various hiring stages and build a streamlined recruitment process to save time and create a more systematized approach to talent acquisition.
Toggl Hire also offers data-driven insights and analytics that help you better understand your recruitment performance. By identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement, you can continuously refine your hiring strategy and align it with your organization’s job architecture and long-term goals.
Create an account to try it free today!
Julia is a freelance writer and fierce remote work advocate. While traveling full-time, she writes about the intersection of technology and productivity, the future of work, and more. Outside work, you can find her hiking, dancing, or reading in a coffee shop.
