The Context: Growth, Complexity, and the Need for Structure
In rapidly growing organizations, role structures rarely evolve in a planned way. They expand organically, new roles are created to solve immediate needs, titles vary across businesses, and similar work begins to look different depending on where it sits. Over time, this leads to fragmentation in job titles, inconsistencies in role scope, and a lack of clarity in how roles compare across the organization.
The organization was simultaneously undergoing a broader transformation, shifting toward a value based operating model, with end-to-end accountability for product lines.
In parallel, it became clear that the underlying job architecture needed to evolve. With multiple mergers and large-scale growth initiatives ahead, this created a pressing need to:
Enable scalability and governance
Support internal mobility across businesses
Ensure consistency in leveling and compensation
To address this, the organization partnered with Mercer to design and implement a standardized job architecture, along with job evaluations using their International Position Evaluation (IPE) methodology.
My Role
Ensuring consistent design logic across businesses
Driving alignment on role rationalization, job structures, and JD formats
Acting as the bridge between Mercer, business HR leaders, and functional stakeholders
Creating a lot of presentations to the Executive Committee
A key part of my role was influencing senior stakeholders, particularly in navigating the tension between Mercer’s push for standardization and Business needs for contextual relevance. We resolved this by introducing controlled job variants, allowing for nuance without creating unnecessary role fragmentation.
"For reasons of discretion, I will not be sharing the specific details of the organization’s job architecture. "Instead, I will focus on the common terminology and structural principles that are widely used across most organizations.
What is Job Architecture?
At its core, job architecture is how an organization systematically structures all roles. It defines:
What roles exist
How they are grouped
How they progress
How they are valued internally and in the market
1. Job Families: Job families group roles based on the type of work performed, not hierarchy.
Finance
HR
Operations
Sales
Digital / Technology
Each job family can further be broken down into sub-families to capture more specialized areas of work. For example: HR → Talent Acquisition, Learning & Development, Rewards, HR Operations | Technology → Software Engineering, Data & Analytics, Infrastructure. This structure helps create clarity on where a role sits functionally, while still allowing for specialization within domains.
2. Job Role vs Job Position
Although often used interchangeably, job role and job position have distinct meanings in job architecture.
A job role refers to a standardized description of work that exists across the organization. It defines:
Purpose of the role
Key responsibilities
Required skills and competencies
Expected level within the job architecture
A job position, on the other hand, refers to an actual instance of that role within the organization. For example:
Job Role: “HR Business Partner”
Job Positions: HRBP – Refining Business, HRBP – Digital Business, HRBP – Corporate Function
In essence, roles define structure, while positions represent how that structure is deployed in practice.
3. Job Levels / Grades
Job levels define progression and seniority across the organization. They create a standardized way to compare roles across different functions, ensuring consistency in how responsibility and seniority are understood. They are typically based on:
Scope of impact
Complexity of work
Decision-making responsibility
Leadership expectations
Why Job Evaluation
Job evaluation is used to establish the relative worth of different roles within an organization in a structured and objective manner. It helps organizations answer critical questions such as:
How do we ensure internal fairness across roles?
How do we compare roles across different functions?
How do we align roles to market benchmarks consistently?
How do we ensure pay equity and governance in job structuring?
Without job evaluation, organizations risk inconsistency in leveling, compensation drift, and subjective decision-making in role design.
Common Evaluation Methodologies: Mercer IPE
One of the most widely used global job evaluation methodologies is Mercer’s International Position Evaluation (IPE) framework. It evaluates roles across three key dimensions:
Impact: Measures the extent to which a role influences business outcomes, based on: Scope (size and scale of responsibility) and Contribution (direct, shared, or advisory impact)
Communication: Assesses the complexity of stakeholder interaction, including: Level of stakeholders engaged, Nature of interaction (informing, influencing, negotiating)
Innovation: Evaluates the level of problem-solving and thinking required, ranging from routine execution to strategic, ambiguous problem-solving.
Why Role Rationalization
Role rationalization is the process of reducing unnecessary complexity in job structures without losing functional depth or business nuance. It includes Consolidating roles that have high overlap, Creating standardized “core roles”, Retaining controlled variations only where truly necessary. The goal is not to reduce jobs, but to reduce structural clutter.
What I learned
Being part of a strategic project like this gave me a lot of exposure to how organizations actually operate and how roles are structured in practice, not just in theory. I got a much better sense of the complexity behind seemingly simple things like job titles, leveling, and role definitions. On a personal level, I learned a lot around stakeholder management, especially working with different HR teams, business leaders, and external partners who all had different perspectives and priorities. It also pushed me to get better at executive communication, running structured discussions, and translating a lot of detailed research and inputs into something that could actually be used and implemented. Overall, it was a very hands-on learning experience in how large-scale HR transformations really come together.
