Job Levels

Pave’s leveling schema is designed for companies of all sizes and consists of 16 levels split across three Tracks.

Job Level Tracks

Tracks are the basic infrastructure of leveling; they define if the level is within Management, Professional, or a Support function. 

• Executive: Executive refers to levels that have purview over entire business units; they often manage managers
• Management: Management refers to levels that manage other employees -- whether they be other managers or individual contributors
• Professional: Professional refers to individual contributors who prioritize, plan and execute long term work. The Professional levels are almost always salaried (or have a salary plus a variable component)
• Support: Support refers to individual contributors whose prioritization is done by a manager; it is associated with temporary/high attrition roles and hourly wages

In Job Levels, Tracks are denoted by “M” for Management, “E” for Executive”, “P” for Professional and “S” for Support.  

Decoding Job Levels

Pave’s job levels are denoted by their “track” (“S” for Support, “P” for Professional, “M” for Management, and “E” for Executive) and their hierarchical level, as denoted by a number. The higher the number, the more senior the role.

There are 16 individual levels, broken down as:

• Executive: E7, E8 & E9
• Management: M3, M4, M5 & M6
• Professional: P1, P2, P3, P4, P5 & P6
• Support: S1, S2 & S3

Choosing the Right Level

Titles and Job Levels

Titles describe a role’s responsibilities and seniority. Just like how you’ve decided to name your conference rooms, often the titling structure is unique to a company’s culture. Here’s roughly how titles and job levels align in Pave’s leveling hierarchy:

Job Responsibilities and Job Levels

The scope of responsibilities of titles varies at different companies. Another way to find the right level is to think about the scope of impact and the responsibilities of the role. Pave partnered with The People Design House -- a group of highly operational People Ops leaders at scaling companies -- to define the scope associated with the different levels.

Note that these level definitions and job responsibilities are generalized so they can apply to all job families; accordingly, you won’t see job-specific skills. 

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Comparing Job Levels to Other Compensation Benchmarks

Pave’s levels were designed in partnership with The People Design House, so that they are simple and easy to understand and apply. Our leveling definitions are unique because:

• The descriptions are designed with fast-growing, performance-based companies in mind.
• Each competency builds and ladders as the level becomes more senior.
  

If you’d like to compare Pave’s Job Levels to Radford or Advanced-HR/Option Impact’s job levels, this is roughly how they compare: 

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