Setup Considerations: job architecture

What this achieves

Job architecture is how your organization describes work rather than people: what a role is, what it requires, what it is worth, and how many of it you have. Four separate things do that job in Humavera, and confusing them is the most common cause of a structure that has to be rebuilt.

The four things, and what each is for

Option	Description
Job family	A grouping of related roles. Organises the architecture.
Grade	A level, used to place pay consistently.
Job profile	The description of a role — its responsibilities, qualifications, and the skills and competencies it requires. Reusable across many positions.
Position	A specific post in the structure, with a department, a grade, a reporting line, a location, and a headcount.

The chain runs one way: a job profile describes a kind of role; a position is an instance of that role in a particular place; an employee fills a position.

Example: at HC Corp UK Ltd, “Senior Software Engineer” is a job profile. A senior engineer post in the Engineering department reporting to Olivia Bennett is a position. James Whitfield is the employee who fills it.

Decision 1: a position is not a person

A position carries a headcount and is tracked as filled versus vacant. One position can therefore hold several people.

That is the single most inverted idea in this section. If you create one position per employee you have built an employee list with extra steps, and you lose the thing positions are for: knowing what you are establishing and staffing against, separately from who currently holds it.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd can hold one warehouse operative position with a headcount of several, tracked as filled and vacant, rather than a separate position for each person.

Decision 2: how many job profiles

A job profile is reusable. Write one per genuinely distinct kind of role, not one per position and certainly not one per person.

The test is whether two posts would carry the same responsibilities and require the same skills. If they would, they share a profile and differ only as positions.

Decision 3: what a job profile is worth writing carefully

Job profiles map skills with a scoring weight, a required flag, and a critical flag. Those are not documentation — they are the inputs gap analysis scores a person against a role with.

A profile with no mapped skills describes a role that nothing can be compared against. If you intend to use readiness or gap analysis at all, the mappings are the point of the profile rather than an optional extra.

Decision 4: grades and pay

A grade is a level. Positions carry a grade, and grades are what let pay be placed consistently rather than negotiated individually each time.

Decide the number of grades against how many genuinely different levels of work you have. Too many and nobody can tell adjacent grades apart; too few and everyone is in the same band.

Decision 5: what is fixed once created

A position’s code cannot be changed after creation. Choose a scheme before you create the first one.

A mapped skill on a job profile also cannot be swapped — you remove it and add the replacement.

Decision 6: deletion guards differ

Positions require assigned employees to be reassigned before deletion. Grades and job families are protected too: 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.

Job profiles are the exception. Their delete confirmation warns that the action cannot be undone and names no such guard, so establish what uses a profile before removing it — the screen will not tell you.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
One position per employee	Highest. Rebuilding means recreating positions and reassigning everyone.
Position code	Cannot be changed at all.
Deleting a grade or job family in use	Blocked until what references it is moved.
Deleting a job profile in use	High. The confirmation names no guard, so check what uses it first.
Restructuring job families	Medium. Profiles are regrouped; positions keep their profile.
Adding skill mappings to a profile	Low. Improves gap analysis from that point.
Publishing a new job profile version	Low. Designed for it.

What happens next

Build grades and job families first, then job profiles, then positions that reference them. Once positions exist, employees are assigned to them and the position hierarchy shows the structure they form.