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Why Levelling Executive Roles Takes a Totally Different Framework

In a fiercely competitive landscape where securing top executive talent can make or break a company’s success, it’s vital that businesses use a comprehensive, data-driven approach to job evaluation. Head-hunters are dropping into executives’ inboxes every week. So, when it comes to getting C-Suite evaluation and salary benchmarking right, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Whether it’s CEO or CHRO, executive roles encompass a sophisticated mix of skills and a huge scope of responsibilities that just don’t factor into other roles. Historically, this has made evaluating them tricky. The good news? We’ve been busy working on a new executive levelling framework that allows for accurate evaluation of C-suite positions - right there in the gradar system.

executive-leveling

Why An Executive-Specific Approach is Needed 

Accurately grading any role involves breaking down its component requirements and responsibilities and evaluating it with objective logic. Yet, when it comes to evaluating executive positions, there are even more moving parts that come into play. 

Whilst standard factors such as required education level and experience are - of course - still relevant, other variables such as the size of the company, geographical scope of a role and the value chain complexity need to be factored into the framework. 

Considering the size of a company, as well as its geographical scope, become essential. This is because the expectations placed on a chief marketing officer leading a small single-location team will be very different to those placed on the CMO overseeing a sprawling corporation’s multinational marketing strategy. 

Many C-Suite positions involve some seriously high-stakes responsibility. They have to manage whole departments, spear-head company-wide strategies and pull the trigger on monumental decisions. Therefore, the level of managerial responsibility, as well as the scope of leadership duties, must be encompassed by a job evaluation framework at this level. 

We don’t need to tell you that securing - and holding on to - executive talent is tough. Compared to other roles, the talent pool is small and competition is fierce. Highly-qualified candidates are used to countless other opportunities dropping into their LinkedIn inboxes each month. Ultimately, candidates at the top of their game are always going to have plenty of options if they don’t feel that they’re being appropriately valued.  

This is why executive-specific job evaluation plays such a pivotal role. Not only does it allow for the scope of these roles to be accurately mapped out against each other, but when benchmarked with salary data, it ensures that organisations are paying competitive salaries that attract and retain the very best candidates for leadership roles.

Introducing Executive Levelling with gradar

Here at gradar, we're thrilled to be launching our executive leveling framework. A totally new approach to accurately evaluating C-Suite positions, it'll allow organisations to accurately evaluate the complex factors that really matter.

We listened to the clients who told us that evaluating executive roles with the traditional gradar model created limitations around the relevance of job grades and results from market data analysis. The ‘regular’ factor levels did not take into account a range of sizing factors needed to deliver an appropriate grade for C-suite positions.

That’s why we expanded our model with a dedicated executive career path, using a custom evaluation logic to cover the level of managerial responsibility, number of employees, type of business unit, geographical scope and value chain complexity.

This is a completely different framework to the existing gradar model - and will be shown as such in the Cross Comparison. Executive roles (from EX-01 to EX-16) will be displayed above levels 1-25 with a divider to differentiate between them.

To suit your needs, you will have the option to show or hide the Executive positions in your Cross Comparison - but will still be able to map them across to your own company-specific levels in the exact same way as the original gradar grade map. 

Want to check it out for yourself? To get the full experience, schedule a private tour of all of our exciting features with one of our gradar experts!