The Job Title On Your Org Chart Is Not The Job

I run compensation data studies almost once a month. A client sends me every employee name, job title, hire date, date of last pay increase, current pay rate, and exempt or non-exempt classification. I plot each person against real market data, geographically rated and adjusted for company revenue, employee count, and years of experience. Then I look at the outliers. The person sitting way above the range. The person who isn’t even hitting the bottom of it. And 9.9 times out of 10, it isn’t a pay problem. It’s a title problem. The title I was handed does not describe the job that person is actually doing.

What this looks like in a real company

Not abstractions. These are the patterns I find in small and mid-sized businesses over and over:

The receptionist who is quietly running your entire benefits open enrollment. That is a real skill, with real liability attached to it, and it is nowhere in her job description.

The operations guy who taught himself to build the dashboards your leadership team now runs the business off of. Also nowhere in his job description. Also the single point of failure if he leaves.

The “Director of Operations” who is functionally a very good office manager, sitting 20% above market, because somebody handed out a title three years ago instead of a raise.

The employee you have classified as exempt who, once you actually write down what they do all day, does not meet the duties test under the Fair Labor Standards Act. That one is not a tidiness problem. That is back wages, and the Department of Labor does not care what the title said.

Why I flipped my own process

I used to run the compensation study first and the job description audit second. Now I do the job description audit first. We ended up doing both anyway, every single time. And the comp numbers don’t mean anything until the titles are honest. If the job description is wrong, you are benchmarking a fiction against real market data and then making pay decisions off the result. Fix the description, then price the job.

To be clear, I am not anti-job-description

I hear a lot of frustration with job descriptions right now, and I understand it. Most companies I meet either don’t have them at all or have a set everybody already knows is stale. So they stop using them, which makes them staler.

But a good job description is doing more work than people realize. It drives:

• Your job posting and where you advertise it

• Your interview questions and your scorecard

• Your onboarding plan and your first 90 days of training

• Your performance management, because “not performing” requires a standard to not perform against

• Your disciplinary documentation, and your termination defense if it comes to that

• Your FLSA exemption classification

• Your compensation benchmarking

When a leader tells me somebody isn’t performing, my first question is always “performing against what?” If the answer is a document nobody has opened in three years, we don’t have a performance problem yet. We have a standards problem, and those are two very different conversations.

“Job titles don’t matter to me”

I hear this from CEOs regularly, and I appreciate the honesty. But titles don’t have to matter to you. They matter to your people.

Think about being early in your career and somebody asks what you do. Your team wants to be able to answer that cleanly. There was a stretch a few years back when everybody got to pick their own title and HR people were walking around as “fun conductors.” I was in HR in mortgage at the time and I could not stand it. It was fun. It was not accurate. And it made every single item on the list above harder to do.

Culture matters. But you cannot hand somebody a company t-shirt and call it culture when their title is wrong, their pay band was built off that wrong title, and their manager has no written standard to coach them against.

What to do this week

Pick your five most expensive roles. Write down what those people actually do all day, in plain language, without looking at the job description first. Then pull the description on file and compare. The distance between those two documents is where your comp outliers live. It is also where your misclassification risk lives, and where your vague performance conversations are coming from. Start there. It is a two-hour exercise that will tell you more about your people operations than a quarter of engagement surveys.

If your job descriptions haven’t been touched in years and you’re not sure what that’s costing you in pay, classification risk, or performance conversations, take the free HR Audit to see exactly where your people systems stand. 👉 saltandlightadvisors.com/hraudit

Resources to keep building:

🎯 Take the free HR Audit - Score your HR systems in 5 minutes and see exactly where your gaps are.

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🎙️ Listen to Don’t Waste the Chaos - The podcast for small business owners building strong people operations. 👉 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471085

📖 Get The HR Easy Button - Kerri’s book on building HR systems that actually work for small businesses. 👉 https://amzn.to/3SbYO0D

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