Define grades and job families

What this achieves

A grade is a level of work, and a job family groups related roles together. Both exist so that positions and pay can be placed consistently rather than decided case by case.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Organization → Grades.
Create each grade with its name and level.
Go to Organization → Job Families.
Create each family with its name and description.

Grades

A grade is referenced by a position, and positions show their grade with its level. That is what lets two posts in different departments be recognised as the same level of work.

Decide the number of grades against how many genuinely different levels of work exist in your organization. Adjacent grades nobody can tell apart get applied inconsistently, and a single grade covering everyone tells you nothing.

Example: a senior engineering post and a senior finance post at HC Corp UK Ltd carry the same grade, which is what makes them comparable for pay placement even though the work differs.

Job families

A job family groups related roles so the architecture stays navigable as it grows. Families are how somebody finds the right job profile in a list of dozens.

Group by the kind of work rather than by department. A family that mirrors your department list adds nothing, because the department is already recorded on the position.

Both are referenced, and deletion is guarded

Grades are referenced by positions, and job families group job profiles. The delete confirmation for each warns that the action cannot be undone and names what blocks it: a grade cannot be deleted while employees, positions, or job profiles use it, and a job family cannot be deleted while job profiles or career paths use it.

That means deleting a grade in use will be stopped. Check what references it anyway, because the question worth answering is whether the grade should still exist, and prefer leaving an unused grade in place over deleting one you are unsure about.

Example: deleting a grade that HC Corp UK Ltd positions still reference is blocked. Move those positions to another grade first if the grade is genuinely being retired.

What happens next

Grades and job families are prerequisites for the rest of the architecture. A job profile belongs to a family; a position carries a grade. Compensation uses grades to define salary bands, which is where the level you set here becomes a pay range.