Paying an individual the right salary can at times be a contentious issue. Whether you are bringing in new talent to your organisation or going through a pay review with your existing employees. Understanding their value to you and their value in the market can be a minefield.
Unfortunately there is no simple answer, and it seems the UK is increasingly becoming more complicated with its views.
This article (almost a white paper) explores how UK organisations are typically evaluating their jobs versus how the US are doing it, and the issues that both countries are running into.
Job evaluation is in a state of change. Although long-established, with the first points factor methods introduced in the U.K. Civil Service in the 1920s, it is one of the most controversial techniques in the whole compensation and benefits cannon. There are uncertainty and controversy on what it exists to do and how it should do it. Lawler, for example, describes it as a mid-20th century tool designed for hierarchical organisations with a high division of labour, an anachronism now in knowledge-based organisations “in a world where people do not have traditional jobs and are able to add considerable value because of their high level of skills.”1 And as Findlay, Findlay and Stewart point out, “There is remarkably little contemporary academic literature on occupational pay comparability’ and the usage and effectiveness of the various different methods.
http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/unz2Y6PD3CnVVy7w9cVz/full