1. Job ranking
The simplest method: line up all jobs from biggest to smallest, usually by committee judgement. Sometimes done as paired comparisons — is job A bigger than job B? — repeated until an order emerges.
- Strengths: fast, cheap, needs no special expertise. Workable for very small companies with a handful of clearly distinct roles.
- Weaknesses: tells you the order of jobs but not the distance between them, so it cannot support salary bands well. Entirely judgement-based, so it inherits every bias in the room and is very hard to defend when challenged. Breaks down completely past ~30 roles.
2. Job classification (grading)
Write grade definitions first — "Grade 5: works under general direction, supervises a small team…" — then slot each job into the grade whose description fits best. This is the traditional civil-service approach, still common in Gulf government entities.
- Strengths: transparent grade definitions that employees can read; straightforward to administer once written; scales to large organisations.
- Weaknesses: real jobs rarely match a single definition cleanly — a role can fit Grade 5 on autonomy but Grade 7 on impact, and the tie-break is subjective. Grade definitions drift out of date, and title inflation pressure lands directly on the classifier.
3. Factor comparison
A hybrid: select key benchmark jobs, rank them factor by factor (skill, responsibility, effort…), and allocate a slice of each benchmark job's actual salary to each factor. Other jobs are then priced by comparing them factor-by-factor against the benchmarks.
- Strengths: more analytical than ranking or classification; produces a direct money value per job.
- Weaknesses: complex to build and explain; tying the model to current salaries bakes existing pay inequities into the methodology itself. Largely abandoned in modern practice for exactly this reason.
4. Point-factor
The modern standard, used in some form by every major compensation consultancy. Define a set of compensable factors — typically knowledge, problem solving, leadership, financial impact and stakeholder complexity — with scored levels for each. Every job is assessed against every factor, the points are summed, and the total maps to a grade.
- Strengths: measures the distance between jobs, not just their order — which is what salary band design actually needs. Consistent across departments, documented, repeatable, and by far the most defensible method under scrutiny from employees, boards or regulators.
- Weaknesses: historically slow and expensive — designing the factor plan and calibrating scores was consultant work billed by the month. This is the gap software now closes.
Side-by-side summary
- Ranking — effort: minimal · rigour: low · defensibility: weak · best for: companies under ~20 roles needing a stopgap.
- Classification — effort: moderate · rigour: medium · defensibility: moderate · best for: public-sector-style organisations with stable, standardised roles.
- Factor comparison — effort: high · rigour: medium · defensibility: weak (pay-anchored) · best for: rarely recommended today.
- Point-factor — effort: high manually, low with software · rigour: high · defensibility: strong · best for: any organisation that needs a real salary structure.
Which should you choose?
If you need grades that can carry salary bands, survive an equal-pay challenge, and stay consistent as you grow, point-factor is the clear answer — the only historical argument against it was cost and speed, and that argument no longer holds. A point-factor evaluation platform like lvlst turns the methodology into a structured questionnaire: answer it for any role and get a grade plus a market salary band for your country in the Gulf or Egypt in minutes, with transparent bundle pricing instead of consulting fees.
New to the topic? Start with what job evaluation is and how it works, or jump straight to the playbook for building a salary structure in the GCC.