Directorate of distance education master of business administration

Job Evaluation  
 
 Job evaluation is defined as the process of objectively analyzing 
and assessing the value of each job in relation to other jobs in an 

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organization.   It aims at finding the relative worth of a job and to 
establish a rational and equitable pay structure. Fredrick Taylor was the 
pioneer who designed a formal, systematic way of assigning pay to jobs 
for improving productivity. His methodology came to be known as Job 
Evaluation. It compares jobs to one another based on their content, which 
is usually defined in terms of compensated factors such as skill, effort, 
responsibility and working conditions. It is mostly a judgmental process 
that demands close cooperation between supervisors, HR specialists and 
the representatives of employers and employees. 
Industry has become increasingly aware of the need for a 
systematic and an objective approach to setting the worth and price 
of each management position in relation to others within a business 
management group, and to similar management positions within a 
geographic region or an industry. While the shop floor and clerical 
planners normally evaluate a job in terms of its duties, a managerial 
position is always evaluated in terms of responsibilities, which could 
include those related to making others perform their duties. 
Job evaluation is highly dynamic in nature.  It is not a one-time 
project but is something that must be maintained on an ongoing basis. 
Jobs do go through change and it is imperative that when any alteration 
happen the job evaluation has to be reviewed and amended to reflect the 
change. Since job evaluation examines the effect of skills, capabilities, 
responsibilities and work environment on the performance of the job 
in a particular context, it cannot be automatically transplanted from 
one company to another.  There would be a lot of localized adaptation 
before finalizing a job evaluation format. Since salaries paid depend 
upon the classification of jobs, job evaluations would have to be done 
conscientiously and administered judiciously. 
Job evaluation rates the job and not the person going to occupy 
it. The cycle of job evaluation is launched first by way of creating  a 
committee of personnel trained in the process, consisting of heads of 
various departments, representatives of employees and a specialist on the 
field, along with the team of Human Resource Department.  The team of  
appraisers would use the job descriptions to determine the relative worth 
of every job in comparison with others.  In this process, the committee 
should subject all the relevant external and internal factors into their 

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active consideration before arriving at a final scheme of fixing pay scales. 
A general guideline provided to these committees is that too many levels 
of pay scales should be avoided through proper grading of jobs. 
Once the jobs that are to be evaluated are listed out, the committee 
sets its tasks towards analyzing the jobs and preparing job description 
statements with regard to each of them. The next activity would be 
to select the method of evaluation to be adopted, keeping in mind 
organizational constraints and the job factors. This activity is followed 
by the classification of jobs in order of importance. Once installed, the 
scheme of job evaluation should be reviewed periodically. The review 
should also benchmark at model organizations emerging out to be the 
best paymasters in the perception of prospective employees.