In practice, a job house often serves as the backbone for three themes that many organizations are currently struggling with: more transparent compensation, faster career progression (without job inflation), and better management of scarce skills. This is particularly relevant now, as pay transparency and "equal pay for equal work" increase the pressure to have your job and compensation foundation in order.
Below: what a job house is exactly, and a pragmatic step-by-step plan to set one up.
What exactly is a job house?
A job house is a coherent system within your organization that can be structured in various ways. You have:
- Job families (e.g., Sales, IT, Operations, Finance)
- Levels within each family (junior/medior/senior, or level 1–8)
- Job profiles (purpose of the role, core tasks, responsibilities, competencies/skills)
- Relationship with compensation through job evaluation (objectively comparing the "weight" of jobs)
The job house is a structure that enables internal comparability, makes career paths explicit, and better explains pay differences. Take the levels, for example: 1 is lower than 3, 1 can reach 3 via 2, and 3 earns more.
Step by step to set up a job house
Your company may be growing so fast that you need more structure. Or you want to establish a clearer boundary between departments. Perhaps you've simply lost track and want to pick it up again. All reasons to set up a job house. How do you do that? We explain it in these steps.
1. Determine the goal and scope
Do not start with job titles, but with why you are doing this. Three common goals:
- Make compensation policy consistent (and reduce discussions about "grading")
- Clarify career paths and development
- Harmonize roles after growth, merger, or restructuring
Then choose your scope: the entire organization at once, or do you look at it department by department, for example, where responsibilities are most unclear? Do you only include permanent positions, or also temporary staff? Do you immediately link everything to salary scales, or do you leave that for now?
Tip: also specify what you are not solving with a job house (e.g., individual performance differences; those belong in performance management).
2) Set up governance: who decides what?
A job house is an HR tool, but it is also a management tool. Therefore, create a compact decision-making structure:
- Owner: usually HR (comp & ben / HR business partner)
- Decision-makers: management/MT for frameworks (levels, compensation philosophy)
- Content responsible: line managers (core tasks and responsibilities)
- Review: works council and/or employee representation where relevant
Especially when linking job evaluation and compensation, you want to have the rules clear in advance. Job evaluation is, after all, about ranking jobs based on 'weight' and transparently justifying pay differences.
3) Inventory what exists now
The plan is there, responsibilities are divided, now you can start. Conduct a baseline measurement, including:
- All job titles and teams
- Existing job profiles (if they exist)
- Actual tasks
- Current grading/salary bands (high-level)
- Pain points: overlap, title inflation, unclear progression, skewed compensation
Plan short interviews (30–45 min) with team leads and have employees describe example work. Avoid discussions about salary right away; you first gather facts.
4) Design the 'blueprint': families, levels, and definitions
Now you create the skeleton. Look at what job families exist: group roles that are similar in content. A family is not necessarily a department; it’s about field/skill set. Internal communication and marketing may operate separately, but can still fall under the same family.
Also look at levels. Define what 'heavier' means at each level. Think about:
- complexity
- independence and responsibilities
- impact/risk of loss
- Influence - only within a team (intern), over an entire department (copywriter) or organization-wide (spokesperson)
- required knowledge and experience
A good job house makes those levels recognizable and repeatable, so that a 'Senior' in Finance does not feel totally different from a 'Senior' in IT (without equalizing roles).
5) Write (or rewrite) job profiles
Create a profile for each role with fixed fields. In many guidelines, you see the same core:
- Purpose of the role
- Key tasks
- Responsibilities/mandate
- Knowledge/skills/competencies
- Context (e.g., who you work with, which systems, which legislation)
A sector guideline puts it very pragmatically: a job house is essentially an overview of all roles, with tools to build and maintain it.
A common pitfall is that profiles become task lists: X does Y, Z does A. It’s better to write down what someone is responsible for and what result is expected. This makes levels more comparable and keeps the autonomy with your employees.
6) Establish a method for objective job evaluation
If you also use the job house for compensation, you need job evaluation: a method to rank jobs relative to each other based on weight, so that pay differences become explainable.
In the Netherlands, various systems are used (e.g., ORBA in collective labor agreement contexts, and also factor/point methods like Hay). The core is always: you assess jobs based on predefined factors and weigh them consistently.
Practical choices you need to make in advance:
- Who evaluates: internally (trained) or externally?
- How do you handle exceptions (scarcity, market supplements)?
- How often do you re-evaluate (e.g., annually or with organizational changes)?
7. Link to compensation structure: salary scales or bands
Only when the structure is in place do you make the bridge to compensation:
- Scales/bands per level or evaluation class
- Rules for entry, growth within band, promotion to the next level
- Relationship with performance (bonus/variable vs fixed)
This is also the moment to sharpen your story internally. If employees later ask 'why is this role higher?', you want to be able to fall back on the systematics.
8) Check legal/employee representation aspects and organize support
You don't need to create a 'holy book', but you do need a supported system. Therefore, organize:
- review rounds with managers
- feedback moments with employees (especially on profiles/level descriptions)
- coordination with works council where necessary
Kill two birds with one stone: eliminate errors and instill trust in it.
9) Implement in HR processes (otherwise it remains a PDF)
A job house only delivers value if you use it in:
- recruitment & selection (job descriptions, grading)
- performance & development (expectations per level)
- training plans (skills per family/level)
- internal mobility and succession planning
This directly connects to topics such as employee retention and development: perspective and growth are hard factors in retention, especially in a tight labor market.
10) Make maintenance a process
Organizations change; roles do too. Document:
- who may initiate changes
- when you re-evaluate profiles (e.g., every six months)
- when a change is 'big enough' for re-evaluation
- version control (so you never have a dispute about which version applies)
The job house thus moves along with the changes in your workplace.
A job house is not an HR project
Setting up a job house forces you to clearly define what roles truly contribute, how jobs relate to each other, and on what basis pay differences are justified. Especially in a time of pay transparency, tight labor market, and growing need for career perspective, this is not a luxury but a necessity.
The strength of a good job house lies not in the thickness of the document, but in the consistency of the system. When roles are clearly described, levels are logically structured, and evaluation is objectively substantiated, calm arises: less discussion about titles and scales, more focus on performance and development.
For organizations that want to professionalize, scale up, or simply gain more control over their personnel policy, the job house thus forms a solid foundation. Not as a static endpoint, but as a living framework that adapts to the organization and the choices of your HR department.
