One of the most common things I hear when working through job family assignments is some
version of: "This is not the right job family. This person not only does X, but they also often do Y.” Almost every job has some deviation from the core job family defintion, and that is okay.
Step 3, assigning every role to a job family, is where you make peace with the fact that compensation is not a system designed to create or celebrate complexity, rather one to be operable and equitable. The only way to keep it operable is one rule: one job, one family.
My approach: the old and faithful 80% rule. Where does most of the most consequential work live? That's your family. The remaining 20% might belong somewhere else, and if those two families price similarly, the decision is easy. If there's a meaningful delta, I'll sometimes flag it to later consider creating an internal family that maps to the primary and apply an economic adjustment to recognize the uniqueness of the role, but that adjustment happens at the pricing stage and not by building a permanent hybrid into the architecture. When it is time for pricing it often comes out in the wash and tying someone to their core job family is enough.
Snowflake roles sound flattering. In practice, they're a nightmare and most roles aren't as unique as many like to make them. The more exceptions you build in, the less defensible the whole system becomes. Nobody wants to build a house of cards out of the gate, so always try to optimize for one assigned job family per person.
Once your people are sorted by job families, you get to Step 4: setting your philosophy. What percentile are you targeting and for which families, locations, etc.?
While not everyrole needs to be priced the same, the first stakeholder instinct is to pay everyone at the top of the market. I push back on that every time. First, you must be intellectually honest with yourself on which roles are make or break for the company and require niche and highly proven talent, and which can thrive with an up-and-comer or someone who is skilled but not likely swatting off recruiter outreach day in and day out. Ask yourself and your team: Which roles, if not filled by exceptional talent, put the business at real risk?" Price those aggressively. The role that manages accounts payable, while important, will not require the same percentile targeting as the technical architect your entire product depends on. When talent supply is genuinely limited, the premium is real and not just negotiated.
The hard truth: compensation philosophy is only one input into whether great people join and stay. Leaders who treat it as the whole answer, but may wonder why they still struggle to attract and retain, are usually avoiding a harder conversation about something else: reputation, culture, leadership, career growth potential, or the business itself. No percentile fixes that.
But when you're clear about where you need to win on pay and where you don't, something shifts. You stop spending where it won't move the needle and you double down where it can. And you walk into every offer conversation knowing exactly on what you're competing and why.
That clarity is the point of having a philosophy at all. The next hurdle, once you have a philosophy in mind, is if you and Finance think you can afford it.
Next up: Step 5, pressure testing your desired philosophy against financial reality, before reality does it for you.
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