Sometimes I feel Job Evaluation is a bit like my favourite tipple – Babycham – although I’ve been a fan of Babycham slightly longer than I have job evaluation (I was always a sucker for anything that came with a cherry on top – cherry bakewells for instance).

Like many, I started out on Babycham when I was allowed a tipple at family events.  I think many grown-ups thought that the cute little deer, and the fact it was served in small glasses, made it less potent than wine or other alcohols.  Most people are quite shocked when they learn that its 6% proof – that’s stronger than most beers.  Many people are also surprised to learn you can still buy it – hence the title for this blog.

I find I sometimes get a similar response from people when I talk about why you need job evaluation.  It fell out of favour for a while, for a variety of reasons, not least because it takes some work.  But I can see it is clearly coming back on trend, now that pay equality is hitting the top 10 issues for HR again.

Like Babycham, job evaluation is a lot more potent than you realise. It doesn’t just measure the size of your jobs.  A fully applied job evaluation scheme will help you understand your internal relativities, align your external relativities for benchmarking and then more.  For instance, you can use the outcomes to underpin your pay structure and support you during organisation changes.  From a legal risk management point of view, it is an exceptionally powerful tool in both spotting Equal Pay claims and defending against them.   You can also use it to underpin and articulate career structures and identify gaps in your succession planning. If you’ve gone to all the effort of sizing your jobs using job evaluation, you might as well then use it to its full extent.  And a bit like Babycham's strength, the information is there; you just need to be just looking in the right place for it.

If you’d like to get beyond the bubbles and talk about job evaluation in more depth, I’d be delighted to help. Just get in touch.