The consistently ascertaining the relative worth of jobs to make job structure is known as Job Evaluation. A struggle to specify inputs that are most worthy to the organization and to establish job hierarchy on the basis of which jobs have less or more of those dimensions also consider as job evaluation. Let’s check below the different methods of job evaluation.
Different Types of Job Evaluation Methods
The job evaluation and development of pay structure is the essence of compensation administration. Job evaluation means that using the information in job analysis to consistently ascertain the worth of every job in relation to all jobs inside the organization. Job evaluation methods are of the following four kinds.
Ranking Method
The description of each job being evaluated is analyzed by the raters and they arrange the jobs in order according to their worth to the business organization.
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In order to simple rank order from highest to lowest, a committee is required that is typically composed of both management & employee representative.
No struggle is made to split down the jobs by particular weighted criteria. The committee members simply compare two jobs and decide which one is more difficult to do or which one is more significant.
And then the other job is compared with the first two and so on until all the jobs have been ranked & evaluated. The sheer inability to be managed in case there are increase numbers of jobs is the most obvious limitation to the ranking method.
There are other drawbacks too like there are no consistent or definite standards by which to justify the rankings. There is no knowledge of distance between the ranks because jobs are only ranked in terms of order.
Classification Method
Classification method refers to a job evaluation method by which some grades or classes are specified to describe a set of jobs.
The classifications are made by specifying some common denominator like knowledge, skills and responsibilities, with the desired objective being the criterion of a number of grades of jobs or of distinct classes.
After the classifications are developed, they are ranked in an entire order of significance according to the criteria selected and every job is put into proper classification.
The later activity is usually performed by comparing every position’s job description against the benchmarked jobs and the classification description.
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Most of the disadvantages of ranking approach are shared by the classification method along with the judging which jobs go where, the difficulty of writing classification descriptions and dealing with the jobs that seem to fall into more than one classification.
Factor Comparison Method
Instead of keeping the whole job in mind by rater during evaluation, they make decisions on separate aspects or factors of the job.
There are five universal job factors according to underlying basic assumption. These universal job factors are as follow
- Mental Requirements
- Skills
- Physical Requirements
- Responsibilities
- Working Conditions
Each of the selected benchmark jobs are ranked by the committee on the relative degree of difficulty for each of the five factors. On the basis of importance of respective factor to the job, the committee then allocates the total pay rates for each job to each factor.
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In the next step a job comparison scale is developed that reflects rankings& money allocations. With the jobs appearing on job comparison scale, the rater compares each job factor by factor. Then, jobs are placed in a proper position by them.
Point Method
Numerical values are assigned by raters to specific job components and job’s relative worth is quantitatively assessed by the sum of these values.
The selection of job factors are required in point method according to the nature of particular group of jobs being evaluated. Job analysis is conducted by analysts along with the writing of job descriptions after determining the groups of jobs to be studied.
Factors are being chosen & defined by analysts in the next step-in order to be used in evaluating
Job worth which become standards used for the evaluation of jobs.
The examples of factors typically used are education, job knowledge, experience, mental effort, responsibility, physical effort and working conditions.
Factor weights are built by the committee according to their relative significance in the jobs being measured and then ascertain total number of points to be employed in the plan. Values of points are distributed to job factor degree and job preparation manual is the next step.
