Briefing: why job titles can be a costly mistake

How much should a sales manager earn? Check one of the online jobs boards and you will swiftly find that the going rate could be anything from £18,000 to £70,000 a year - which is not much help if you have a post to fill or salary to benchmark.

A similar issue arises when you try customer services representative, marketing executive or business analyst. Different companies, or even different parts of the same company, often lump a wide range of roles together under the same job title.

Job titles then become so generic that they offer little clue to the level of seniority or range of responsibilities expected of the person. And in turn that means you can draw very few assumptions about the level of pay that is appropriate.

Get it wrong and you could find yourself paying out tens of thousands of pounds a year more than you should while storing up staff retention problems by recruiting at the wrong levels.

Despite this, some companies claiming to offer salary surveys and benchmarking services persist in collecting and publishing pay data on the basis of job title alone. The results are almost meaningless for any real comparisons.

So how can you be sure when setting a salary level that the job you have is being benchmarked against similar roles, rather than with any role that just happens to have the same job title?

Over many years, CELRE has developed a matrix based on job levels (reflecting seniority) and job functions (which describe the type of work carried out).

So, for example, when matching a marketing manager role, CELRE allocates:

• a job level by looking at the size of management responsibility - in terms of strategic input, numbers of staff and size of budget; and
• a job function based on the breadth of role - whether, for instance, the postholder manages the overall marketing function, telemarketing or customer research.

Each of the many tens of thousands of posts in our salary surveys is then assigned a code which accurately describes where the role sits in the matrix, ensuring you can pinpoint a suitable benchmark for any given job.

When you sign up as a participating subscriber to our salary surveys, you will be expected to submit pay data which includes job level and job function codes for each post. We call this job matching.

We know that this can be a time-consuming process. We offer written and telephone help with this, and can send an expert to see you if you need help to get started. Over the coming year we will also be developing additional tools to simplify the process as much as possible.

But the advantages of going through this process are enormous.

First, you can be absolutely certain that when you match a job that has been coded at, say, 16 (the job level) and 730 (the job function), you are getting back salary data for jobs that are very similar in seniority and scope to your role.

And second, when you use XpertHR Job Pricing  powered by CELRE, you can actually see, in a single table or graph, comparable data both for your own company's roles and those of others in the survey.

In short then, the use of job titles as a basis for salary comparisons is a huge mistake. The only way to be sure, is to go through a proper job matching process.