Job levelling brings structure to how roles are defined and valued across an organisation.
Without it, compensation decisions become inconsistent, career progression feels arbitrary, and employees lack clarity on what it takes to advance.
With it, you create a foundation for fair pay, clear growth pathways, and consistent talent decisions across every team.
In this guide, we'll walk through what job levelling actually is, why it matters, and how to build a best practice level framework that scales with your organisation.
What is job levelling?
Job levelling is the process of defining a hierarchy of seniority across roles within an organisation. It establishes clear distinctions between levels based on objective criteria like responsibility, impact, and expertise – not subjective factors like years of experience.
A job level framework is the output of this process: a structured system that groups roles into career tracks (e.g. IC/Professional vs Management) and levels (e.g. P3 vs P4), and defines what each level means in terms of scope, autonomy, and contribution to the business – as well as making it possible to benchmark compensation accurately.
Why is job levelling important?
A well-defined level framework creates clarity, consistency, and fairness in a company’s compensation and career progression decisions – as well as enabling accurate salary benchmarking.
Without structured job levelling, companies struggle with inflated job titles, inconsistent role definitions (and compensation decisions) across the company, and employees who don't understand how to progress.
Let’s take a closer look.
Job levelling enables fair, consistent decisions on pay and progression
A level framework ensures compensation and promotion decisions follow the same logic across the entire organisation.
Without it, similar roles end up with different pay based on which manager hired them, when they joined, or how well they negotiated. Promotion criteria become unclear, leading to frustration and perceptions of favouritism.
With clear level definitions, everyone understands how decisions are made. A P3 promotion requires demonstrating specific documented capabilities, regardless of which team you're on or who your manager is.
Job levelling creates a solid foundation for pay equity and compliance
Those fair, consistent decisions create the foundation for tracking and maintaining pay equity.
When you apply the same level definitions across the organisation, you ensure employees doing work of equal value are treated equivalently – same scope, same autonomy, same impact expectations.
Without that consistency, pay inequities creep in. One hiring manager interprets "senior" differently than another. Departments create their own progression criteria. Employees with the same responsibilities end up at different levels (and different pay) simply because they sit in different teams.
Plus, with the EU Pay Transparency Directive almost upon us, clear level definitions aren't just good practice – they're a compliance requirement. The Directive mandates that employers make pay levels and career progression criteria easily accessible to employees, and you can't be transparent about something you haven't clearly defined.
Job levelling enables accurate salary benchmarking
To be able to accurately apply salary benchmarking data to your company, you need to know how your definition of “P3 Software Engineer” lines up with your compensation benchmarking provider’s definition of “P3 Software Engineer”.
Five different companies might have five different variations of their "P3 Software Engineer” role – each with different scopes and seniority levels – so without a clear understanding of your own levels, it’s impossible to ensure a like-for-like comparison between your internal structure and the market.
Job levelling ensures clear role expectations and career progression for employees
A hierarchy of job levels that includes the responsibilities, expectations, and capabilities at each level creates shared understanding across the organisation.
For People teams, it becomes straightforward to answer manager and employee questions, because everyone is working from the same structure.
For employees, increased visibility into how decisions are made improves perceived fairness and engagement. They understand what's expected at their current level and what they need to demonstrate to progress.
Market insights and expert perspectives, delivered straight to your inbox monthly 📩
How to run a best practice job levelling process
Running a job levelling process means two things: building a structured level framework for your organisation, then using that framework to level individual roles consistently.
You can't do the second without the first. Trying to level roles one-by-one without an underlying framework leads to inconsistency - the same job title ends up at different levels depending on who's doing the levelling or which team it sits in.
Here's how to build a framework you can apply reliably:
- Decide on career tracks: define which tracks (Professional, Management, Executive, Support) your organisation needs
- Decide on number of levels: determine how many levels within each track will provide meaningful differentiation as you scale
- Map existing roles to the framework: place your current employees into the structure
- Apply consistently going forward: use the framework for every hiring, promotion, and progression decision.
Let's walk through each step.
Step 1: Decide on career tracks and number of levels
The foundation of your framework is determining which career tracks you need and how many levels within each track.
Career tracks group employees by how their success is measured:
- Professional or Individual Contributor (P or IC): Success measured by personal output and expertise
- Management (M): Success measured by team delivery and leadership impact
- Executive (E): Success measured by business outcomes and strategic direction
Some companies also include a Support (S) track for operational or administrative roles, typically in larger organisations with higher headcount or industries where manual labour roles are common e.g. logistics.
One critical design principle is that Professional and Management tracks should be parallel, not hierarchical. Becoming a manager shouldn't be the only path to senior levels and higher compensation – not everyone is suited to people management, and forcing high-performing individual contributors into management roles to progress creates bad managers and loses great ICs. Companies need both deep technical expertise and strong people leadership – they're different skills, equally valuable, and should be recognised as such.
Tip: Build one level framework for the entire organisation
Avoid creating separate frameworks for different departments or functions.
It's tempting to let Engineering build their own level structure with different criteria than Marketing. Don't. This creates inconsistency that makes it impossible to benchmark fairly or ensure pay equity across the company.
"Keep your levels generic," Figen advises. "Create a structure that can flex across functions, and then add a marketing lens, or a tech lens, as needed. You don't want to rewrite the framework for every job family because that’s where inconsistency creeps in."
The framework should be universal. The criteria for P3 applies whether you're a P3 Software Engineer or a P3 Content Manager. The specific skills differ, but the level of autonomy, impact, and expertise should be equivalent.
Step 2: Decide how many job levels within each track
Once you've defined your career tracks, you need to determine how many levels sit within each track.
Too few levels and you lose the ability to differentiate between a junior employee and a seasoned professional. Too many levels and it becomes complex to use.
Each level should represent a clear shift in autonomy, impact, or scope – not just "slightly more experienced than the level below." If you can't articulate what genuinely changes between Level 4 and Level 5, you don't need both.
Most companies find 5-6 levels for Professional, 4-5 for Management, and 2-3 for Executive works well. This provides enough granularity for clear progression without over-engineering the system.
Ravio's level framework, for instance, uses P1-P6 for Professional, M1-M5 for Management, and E1-E3 for Executive – 12 levels total across all tracks.
A snapshot of Ravio's level framework
Tip: Design your level framework to be scalable and company-wide
If you're an early-stage company with 30 employees, you won't need 12 levels of seniority immediately – you might only have people at P1-P3, M1, and E1 right now.
But design the framework for where you're heading, not just where you are today.
"If you make your levels too aligned to how your company works right now then you'll have to change it every time you grow, restructure, or pivot," says Figen Zaim, Founder of Olivier Reward Consulting. "And that's just not sustainable."
If you only create the levels that currently exist in your org chart, you'll be forced to rebuild the framework every time you add a layer of seniority – when you hire your first principal engineer, your first director, your first VP.
Instead, include levels you plan to add in your future organisation design, but don't currently have employees in. When you're ready to hire at P6 or M4, the structure already exists to place them consistently.
Step 3: Define clear criteria for each level
Once you've decided on tracks and levels, you need to define what each level actually means.
Vague descriptions like "demonstrates senior-level expertise" or "shows leadership" don't help anyone make consistent decisions. You need objective, measurable criteria, like:
- Autonomy: Does the role operate independently or with guidance?
- Impact: What effect does the role have on organisational performance?
- Scope: How wide is the subject area or set of responsibilities?
- Expertise: What level of skill or knowledge is expected?
- Complexity: How varied and difficult are the problems to solve?
- Leadership: Does the role influence or guide other roles or teams?
For example, Ravio’s level framework definitions differentiate between P2 and P3 like this:
P2 (Professional, developing):
- Expertise: Has working knowledge and experience in own discipline
- Autonomy: Receives moderate guidance and direction
- Impact: Low to moderate impact on success of own function
P3 (Professional, established):
- Autonomy: Works independently with minimal guidance
- Impact: Medium impact on success of own function
Expertise: Has in-depth knowledge, acts as a resource for colleagues with less experience
Tip: Get stakeholder alignment before you roll out
Your level framework needs buy-in from leadership, finance, and department heads before implementation.
Leadership and founders often have strong opinions on levels and titles – particularly their own. Get them aligned on the framework early, including how executive levels work and what differentiates an E1 from an E2.
Finance needs to understand how the framework impacts compensation budgets, particularly if you need to make adjustments to bring misaligned employees into structure.
Department heads will be applying this framework to their teams daily. If they don't understand it or disagree with it, they'll work around it.
Vaso Parisinou, Chief People Officer at Ravio, even suggests aligning with employees too: "After you've got alignment from the relevant stakeholders, you may also want to stress-test your level framework with an employee focus group. I'm always stunned by the impactful and nuanced observations they provide!"
Step 4: Map existing roles to the level framework
With your levelling framework defined, you need to place your current employees into it.
Assess each role against your defined criteria. Look at the actual work being done, not the job title. A "Head of Marketing" at a 30-person startup might actually be performing P3-level work if they're executing campaigns with guidance rather than setting strategic direction and managing a substantial team.
Tip: Expect difficult conversations when mapping existing employees
Some employees might be way out-performing their role scope – meaning discussions about promoting them to their true level need to be had.
On the other hand, some might actually be performing a role at a lower level than their title suggests, particularly if title inflation has occurred during growth.
Titles might need to be adjusted, which will lead to frustration for the employees impacted.
It's very difficult to reduce compensation along with this, so you'll likely need to grandfather existing employees into their current titles and compensation – applying the new framework only to future hires and promotions. Over time, the structure normalises, as those employees progress into their seniority level (or leave the company).
Step 5: Apply your job levels consistently going forward
The framework only works if it's used consistently for every talent decision.
For hiring new roles: Level the role before you write the job description. "We're hiring a P3 Product Manager" ensures you're clear on scope and compensation range from the start. Sometimes roles might span two levels if you're open to different experience profiles – that's fine, but be explicit about it.
For candidate assessment: Place job candidates objectively against the level criteria. A candidate demonstrating P3-level autonomy and impact gets levelled at P3, regardless of their years of experience or negotiation skills. The moment you make exceptions – "This candidate is too good to lose, let's call them P5 even though they're really P4" – you undermine the framework.
For performance reviews: Level criteria should inform performance expectations. If someone is currently at P3 level but is consistently achieving some P4 level requirements, that’s evidence they’re performing highly and should be working towards promotion.
For promotions: Promotions should require demonstrating the capabilities defined at the next level. A P3 moving to P4 needs to show the increased autonomy, impact, and expertise that P4 requires – not just tenure or manager preference.
Example job levelling frameworks
Different companies structure their level frameworks in different ways, depending on their size, stage, and needs. Here are three examples that illustrate different approaches:
Plastometrex: Adopting Ravio's framework as an early-stage startup
Plastometrex, an industrial tech company based in Cambridge, didn't have a formal level framework before working with Ravio. As CEO James Dean explains it, roles were grouped loosely across three divisions (technology and science, sales and marketing, operations), but there were no clear level definitions or progression pathways.
Plastometrex adopted Ravio's level framework wholesale. The 12-level structure (P1-P6, M1-M5, E1-E3) gave them a ready-made system that could scale with the business without needing to be rebuilt.
"Ravio's levelling framework gave us a clear structure with defined levels, pathways for progression, and a way to map our existing team to roles that were consistent across the business," says James.
For small companies building their first framework, adopting an existing industry-standard structure like Ravio's can save months of work whilst still providing the consistency and clarity needed for fair compensation decisions.
Luminovo: Levels with sublevels for granular progression
Luminovo, a Munich-based AI tech company, uses a level framework with an additional layer of granularity: sublevels.
Levels are defined by three clear criteria:
- Scope of influence: How broad is the impact of the role?
- Responsibility: What decisions and outcomes does the role own?
- Accountability: What results is the role measured against?
And then each level (P1, P2, P3, etc.) contains three sublevels (.1, .2, .3) that mark progression within that level. For instance:
- P3.1 (new): Just promoted into the level
- P3.2 (established): Consistently performing at the level
- P3.3 (advanced): Starting to demonstrate next-level capabilities.
This structure allows Luminovo to recognise incremental growth and tie compensation increases to clear milestones without needing to promote someone to the next full level.
Buffer: Levels with steps for transparent progression
Buffer's level framework is inseparable from their radical transparency philosophy. Since 2013, all Buffer salaries have been publicly available – not just internally, but on their website for anyone to see.
This commitment to transparency meant their level framework needed to be crystal clear and defensible. "We believe that trust is the foundation of great teamwork, and we've learned from over a decade of experience that transparency breeds trust," says Joel Gascoigne, Buffer's CEO.
In the early days, each Buffer department had autonomy over levels and titles. This created exactly the inconsistency problem we discussed earlier – the same work ended up at different levels depending on which team you sat in
So Buffer introduced a standardised framework, now using 12 levels total, matching industry-standard frameworks to maintain external comparability.
But they added an additional element: two steps within each level (similar to Luminovo’s approach):
- Step 1: The default for employees fulfilling expectations at their level
- Step 2: The "halfway point" between levels, for employees who are very experienced and starting to show next-level capabilities
This structure serves Buffer's transparency goals in two ways.
First, it creates clear, documentable milestones that can be explained objectively – essential when your salaries are public.
Second, it provides a progression pathway that doesn't rely on subjective performance ratings, which could introduce bias and undermine their pay equity commitments.
Job levelling template: plug and play with Ravio's level framework
If you're building your first level framework, you don't need to start from scratch. Ravio's level framework provides a ready-made template that you can adopt or adapt to fit your organisation.
The framework is designed to be universal – scalable from startups to mature companies, applicable across any function or industry, and built on objective criteria that remove subjectivity from levelling decisions.
The core Ravio level framework has three career tracks and 12 levels total:
- Support (S1-S4): Operational or administrative roles where success is measured by task completion and service delivery
- Professional (P1-P6): Individual contributors where success is measured by personal output and expertise
- Management/Executive (M1-M5, E1-E3): Leadership roles where success is measured by team delivery (Management) or business outcomes (Executive)
Some levels are shared across tracks, because Professional and Management tracks are parallel, not hierarchical – a P4 (advanced professional) is typically equivalent to an M2 (Manager) in terms of seniority, scope, and compensation, for instance. This ensures that becoming a people manager isn't the only path to senior levels and higher compensation - deep technical expertise is recognised as equally valuable.
Each level in the Ravio framework is differentiated using six key criteria:
- Leadership: To what extent does the role influence or guide other roles or teams?
- Impact: What effect does the role have on the organisation's performance or goals?
- Scope: How wide is the subject area or set of responsibilities the role is accountable for?
- Autonomy: To what extent is the role expected to operate independently or with guidance?
- Expertise: What level of skill or knowledge in the given subject area is expected from the role?
- Complexity: How many and varied are the problems that the role is expected to solve?
If you’d like to use the Ravio level framework as your template, here’s the full framework with detailed descriptions for all 12 levels.
Ravio can implement your level framework for you in days, not months
Building a level framework from scratch can take months of stakeholder alignment and manual mapping. Ravio does it for you in under a week.
When you onboard with Ravio, our team analyses your current org structure, job titles, and role descriptions, then maps each employee to the appropriate Ravio level. You can review and adjust the mapping in your account if needed.
The result: a complete, implemented level framework with accurate salary benchmarking data available to use accurately immediately – because your employees are already mapped to our framework and ready to benchmark.
FAQs
What is the definition of job levelling?
Job levelling is the process of defining a hierarchy of seniority across roles within an organisation. It assesses relative value and establishes clear distinctions between levels based on objective criteria like responsibility, impact, autonomy, and expertise – creating a structured framework that ensures consistent compensation and career progression decisions.
What is a job levelling matrix?
A job levelling matrix is a visual tool that maps roles against level criteria to determine appropriate placement within a level framework. It typically shows roles on one axis and evaluation factors (like scope, autonomy, impact) on the other, making it easier to compare roles and ensure consistent levelling decisions across the organisation.
What is the best software to help with job levelling?
Ravio provides automated job levelling to an industry-standard level framework. When you onboard to Ravio’s compensation benchmarking platform, our team of experts maps your employees to our level framework for you. Then you can use that framework for accurate salary benchmarking and building structured salary bands. Other job evaluation tools include Mercer's IPE, Radford's job levelling service, and Korn Ferry's Hay method.
What methodologies are there for job levelling?
Common job levelling methodologies include:
- Point-factor method: Assigns points to compensable factors (skills, responsibility, complexity) to score each role
- Factor comparison: Evaluates roles against key factors and assigns monetary value to each
- Job ranking: Ranks all jobs from highest to lowest value based on overall contribution
- Market pricing: Uses external salary benchmarking data to determine relative value
The specific methodology you choose matters less than having clear, objective criteria that create consistency.
How do I set up job levelling right for my startup?
Start with a simple but scalable framework. Define 2-3 career tracks (Professional, Management, Executive) with 5-6 levels each. Use objective criteria like autonomy, impact, and scope to differentiate levels.
Build the framework for where you're heading, not just current headcount, so you don't need to rebuild it as you grow. Get stakeholder alignment from leadership and finance before rolling out. And consider adopting an existing framework like Ravio's rather than building from scratch – it saves months of work whilst ensuring industry alignment
What's the difference between job levelling and job mapping?
Job levelling and job mapping are related but distinct concepts, and the terminology can get confusing because "mapping" is used in multiple contexts.
Job levelling means creating or applying a level framework within your organisation – defining what levels exist and what they mean, then placing roles into those levels.
Job mapping means matching roles or frameworks together to ensure consistent comparisons – either placing individual roles into your level framework, or aligning your level framework with another level framework:
- Mapping roles to your internal level framework. This is levelling an individual role to a level in your framework: "Product Manager = P4."
- Mapping between different level frameworks. This happens when you're using external benchmarking data. For instance, Ravio uses its own standardised level framework for compensation data. If your internal levels use different naming (IC1-IC6 instead of P1-P6) or different definitions of what each level means, you need to map your levels to Ravio's levels to ensure you're comparing equivalent roles between your organisation and the data, when benchmarking salaries.
