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 Grade definitions drift out of date, and title inflation pressure lands directly on the classifier.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 one-time evaluation bundles 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.