Job Leveling: How it works, and free levelling frameworks

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What is a job leveling framework?

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A leveling framework is a structured tool for anyone within an organisation to:

• Define expectations in specific roles & levels
• Develop and give visibility on career options from ah high level overview
• Boost and manage internal mobility

This mapping of role and responsibilities will be used as much by HRs and Managers to manage teams and organisations, as it will be by employees themselves to steer their career evolution.

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Why having one for your team?

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There are lots of benefits coming out of a leveling framework, just to name a few:

• It will help you create consistency across your HR programs, as you’ll start applying a one and only, standard, mapping for any kind of topic (compensation, performance, rewards, training, etc.)
• Particularly, it supports a fair compensation for equal work model
• You will outline clearly career growth opportunities, which will both support internal mobilities and employee retention on the long run.
• A clear framework will support effective planning as you will have a clearer vision on the expectations you can have, and map them to your business needs.
• Last but not least, it can ease administration harmonization: make job titles uniform, make compensation discussions easier, support rewards discussions, etc.

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How does it work and when to use it?

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Once in place you will use your leveling framework at all stages of the employee journey:

• Hiring: at the end of the interview process you’ll be able to position your new employee on your leveling grid, to set the expectations and define their compensation level
• Performance evaluation: beyond personal objectives you’ll be able to assess their evolution compared to the expectations in terms of scope, responsibilities and possible competencies if you defined them for each job.
• Compensation reviews
• Salary reviews will be linked to your leveling framework either as you’ll have set some salary ranges per level, or because you’ll use a benchmark tool also using this kind of infrastructure.
• Depending on your internal process, the leveling framework can also be linked to a bonus, equity, or individual reward schemes.

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⚒️ Figures free leveling frameworks

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Our belief is that you can’t create a single leveling framework that can work for companies of all sizes and maturity level. A basic framework could prove not sophisticated enough for large organizations but a more granular one could prove too complex for early-stage companies.We chose to have two frameworks a simple one and an advanced one so that we could cover the needs of organizations of all sizes!

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The simple framework - duplicate it here

This option will be a good fit for companies with a headcount up to 200/250 employees.

→ Your organization is growing, some layers of management are appearing along the way, but the overall structure remains “simple”.

Level hints are here to help you understand the main differences between the level you’re looking at and the previous one, in case of hesitation!

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The advanced framework - duplicate it here

This option will better fit large companies with more than 250+ people, who already overcame a simple framework as their organization is getting more and more complex.

→ New teams being created, new levels of management are needed, and more granularity in terms of impact or influence are to be considered to define someone’s level.

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How to chose a framework?

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You already have an existing leveling framework

Congratulations! You already have your own leveling framework, and no matter what it looks like you will be able to match it to ours!

It’s time to chose between Simple and Advanced, the framework that is the closest to yours:

1. You might have the exact same structure as one of our two frameworks, then it’s an easy choice!
2. If you notice some differences (you might have 5 IC / 5 managers levels for instance), then we’ll recommend that you use the Advanced framework, it will be easier for you to i. map your employees today, and ii. scale your use of Figures and possibly your internal tools with more levels in the near future.
3. If you have more levels than our Advanced version, it’s likely you will have to regroup some of your levels into ours, for that you can check our high level definitions.

In any case, if you have a doubt or need help on the matching, feel free to contact us so we can provide support.

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You don’t have a leveling framework and want to create one

Until then you didn’t need a proper leveling framework due to your company size or model of organization, but it’s now time for you to structure things out!

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You can base your decision on several criteria, the most common combo of things you should think about being:

→ The size of your company, and the headcount growth you are anticipating

• If your company is currently less than 200 employees and you’re not planning on growth in the coming 12 months, you might want to keep things simple, and use a framework with fewer levels (the simple framework)
• If your company is about 50 people or more and you are planning for substantial growth (let’s say at least x1.5) in 12 months or if you already have more than 200 people, then you should think about starting things of directly with the Advanced framework. Even if you might not use all levels from the get go, you will soon enough realise your organization’s structure is evolving quickly and need more granularity than a Simple framework can offer you. Instead of adding levels later on (which is not always an easy task), better think of them from the beginning, and not re-do the job in 6 to 12 months to fit your new needs.

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You don’t have a leveling framework and don’t want to create one

The size of your team or your current organization might not need for you to create a leveling framework just yet, and that’s fine!

Depending on the size of your team, chose the Simple or Advanced framework when you set up your company’s account.

• For companies of less than 200/250 employees, we recommend to chose the Simple framework, as you probably don’t need more granularity and don’t have that many layers of management.
• For companies above this headcount, the Advanced framework will be more appropriate as you’ll be able to differenciate more precisely your employees based on scope, level of responsibility or influence, which your organisation most likely requests you to.

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Find out how to implement your leveling in your compensation strategy!