Hay Job Evaluation

THE HAY JOB EVALUATION SYSTEM

1. Introduction

The Hay Job Grading Scheme was developed in the early 1950's by E. N. Hay and Associates. It is a scheme which is based on the "points factor" approach. This is a common approach to job grading. The process has the following basic steps:

A description of the job is made including such things as: expertise required, accountabilities, experience required, functions performed, financial impact of the job, freedom to decide and act, number of staff supervised, pre-eminence of the position, influence of the position within the company etc.

The various aspects of the job given in the description are usually split into categories. For example, in the Hay system the categories are:

□ Know How

□ Problem Solving

□ Accountability

□ Working Conditions

(This was included after the initial creation of the scheme in an attempt to enable the Hay system to be applied to blue collar occupations).

Other systems may have different sets of categories. For example, the OCR system, uses the following categories:

□ Knowledge, Skills and Experience

□ Reasoning and Decision Making

□ Communication and Influence

□ Accountability and Responsibility

The description of the job is done under the headings given by the job grading system's categories.

This description of the job is then compared with a standard set of descriptors (i.e. a set of statements from the job grading manual which describe the aspects of a job) and the most appropriate descriptors, in each category, for that job are selected from the set. So, for the Hay system, a manual with descriptors in each of the above categories is used to grade the job. The job grader selects the descriptor which (in their view) most accurately describes that category of the job. (An example of a Hay descriptor under the category of "Know How" is: “Jobs requiring procedural or systematic proficiency, which may involve a...