EU Pay Transparency: What Should a Job Profile Include? (and a QA Checklist for Your Managers)
SkillsTrust
• 4 minute read
Q. HR leaders regularly ask us the same question: what reference material should we use as the basis for our job evaluation scores? Can we use the job descriptions that we already have?
A job profile is not a job description, but it's a good place to start
If you already have job descriptions for all jobs, you're ahead of many organisations. However, a job description and a job profile are built for different purposes, and it's worth understanding the difference before you begin.
A job description is often written to attract job candidates. It may include company mission statements and language chosen for appeal rather than accuracy, for example "Be a team player" rather than "Collaborate effectively with colleagues."
A job profile captures the essential requirements of the role in terms of the job purpose, the skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions necessary to perform it.
The practical implication isn't to throw out your job descriptions. They are a useful starting point but usually need to be refined before they're ready to use for job evaluation. The process of refinement typically involves stripping out the marketing language, and making sure the essential job profile requirements are included and covered in a sufficient degree of detail for job evaluation.
What should a job profile contain?
It is helpful to start with a good job profile template. We recommend the Job Profile template published by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) as part of their EU-wide guidelines on job evaluation. It has eight fields:
Title
Department
Reports to
Job Purpose
Skills
Responsibility
Effort
Working Conditions
Your existing job descriptions likely have coverage across some but not all of these fields.
Two ways to build these out
Involve employees directly. EIGE recommends having employees provide input into their own job profiles through questionnaires and interviews. This captures the full picture, including the tasks and demands that may get lost in written documentation, but it takes real time and coordination. Read more here.
Have line managers review a draft instead. If you're resource-constrained, as many HR teams are, give line managers a draft job profile to review, along with context on the job evaluation method so their edits stay aligned with how the job will actually be scored. The draft should follow the job profile template and can build on the existing job description. If you don't have a job description to work from, pay transparency platforms like SkillsTrust can generate a draft for managers to review as a starting point and edit as needed.
What level of detail is required in the job profile?
Every job evaluation score associated with a job is essentially a claim that you may need to explain or defend later, to an employee, a works council, or a regulator.
That means that each score should ideally have a piece of evidence supporting it in the job profile.
The EIGE point factor method scores each job across 14 subfactors aligned to 4 factors: skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.
This is a simple checklist that we suggest for structured review of job profiles.
Checklist: does the job profile cover the right things and in enough detail?
Job Purpose — does this provide a clear, concise summary (two or three sentences) of why this job exists and its contribution to organisational objectives?
Skills — have you included at least one sentence about essential skills requirements in terms of:
Knowledge required to perform in the job
Interpersonal and communication skills
Problem solving skills
Planning and organisational skills
Physical skills
Responsibility — have you included at least one sentence about essential responsibility requirements in terms of:
People
Financial resources
Information
Goods and equipment
Effort — have you included at least one sentence about essential effort requirements in terms of:
Mental effort
Psychosocial and emotional effort
Physical effort
Working conditions — have you included at least one sentence about essential requirements in terms of:
The environment in which work is performed (and related physical, psychological or emotional conditions)
Organisational demands in terms of working hours and connectivity/availability demands.
If you omit details for any of these subfactors, it may be assumed that the job does not require them so it’s important to detail all pertinent subfactor requirements.
Other pitfalls that undermine otherwise good profiles
Language that isn't gender-neutral. It’s imperative that your job profiles are objective and gender-neutral. You can check your job profiles for any gendered language using a Gender Decoder tool such as this one recommended by the EU.
Describing the person instead of the job. A profile should relate to the job requirements, not the characteristics of any individual currently in the role.
Next Steps: Get the Manager Pack & QA Checklist
To help you put this into practice, we've put together a manager pack you can hand to whoever is reviewing job profiles on your team. It includes a short intro explaining why they're being asked to review job profiles in the first place, a one-page checklist covering the same eight fields and fourteen subfactors outlined above, and a cheat sheet that defines each subfactor and its range, so managers can judge whether a sentence is specific enough without needing to become job evaluation experts themselves.
