Troubleshooting Pay Inequity: Why Your Job Architecture Isn’t Enough

By Erin Richards

A robust job architecture is one of the most powerful tools HR leaders can put in place. At its best, it is the backbone that connects talent, pay, and performance to strategy. Job architecture creates clarity around roles, levels, and career paths, helping employees see how their work is valued and what growth looks like. For the business, it brings discipline to pay structures, enables fair and consistent decisions, and provides a foundation for workforce planning. 

And yet, companies may find that despite a clean structure and thoughtfully designed pay bands, pay inequities still persist.

From our work with clients across industries – from technology to retail to biotech, and in organizations ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand employees – when a strong job architecture is in place but pay inequities persist, the cause is almost never the architecture itself.

What breaks down is the ecosystem around it: the processes, the technology, and the governance that are meant to support it. Before you rebuild your architecture, let’s troubleshoot the key areas where the real issues usually lie.

The Process Problem

Job architecture sets the rules, but HR processes determine how those rules are applied. If your processes are fragile, they will undermine the architecture. This is especially true in three key areas: starting pay, promotions, and performance management. 

When these processes have gaps, employees notice. The architecture isn’t failing; the execution is.

Troubleshooting Your Processes:

• Starting Pay: Are managers free to set starting pay based on a candidate’s previous salary rather than the value of the role? This one decision can perpetuate historical inequities for years.

• Promotions: Do you have consistent, documented criteria for advancement? Or do two employees with the same performance advance on different timelines based on visibility or advocacy?

• Performance: Are your performance ratings calibrated across managers to minimize subjectivity? Or can subjective judgments skew rewards and progression, undercutting the fairness you built?

The solution is to tighten these processes so they reinforce, rather than undermine, the architecture. This means setting clear rules for new hire offers, introducing structured promotion criteria, and calibrating performance reviews across managers to minimize subjectivity. It also requires training leaders to understand how to apply the architecture fairly, not just what it is. When processes are aligned with the framework, the promise of equity moves from theory into day-to-day practice.

When Technology Works Against You

Your technology should be the enforcer of fairness, but often it’s part of the problem. The challenge is even greater today as HR teams layer new AI tools onto an already complex tech stack. Legacy systems or poorly configured tools can actively work against your goals, making inequities harder to spot and easier to perpetuate. 

Troubleshooting Your Technology:

• Performance Management: Do your performance platforms enable consistent calibration across functions, or are performance ratings submitted in a silo? 

• Compensation Management: Do your compensation systems make it easy to override pay bands or fail to flag outliers? Are outliers automatically routed for secondary approval or can managers make unilateral decisions?

• Talent Acquisition: Does your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) allow for wide negotiation ranges that undermine pay consistency from day one? Do recruiters have access to the latest compensation guidelines directly in the ATS or do they exist in a hard-to-use spreadsheet?

• Data Integrity: Do your HRIS, performance, and compensation platforms "talk" to each other? Or do messy handoffs and inconsistent data erode the clarity the architecture was meant to provide?

The solution is to make technology an active partner. Modern compensation platforms can enforce pay bands automatically, flag anomalies in real time, and provide analytics that highlight where inequities may be forming. Performance systems can build calibration into the workflow, ensuring managers’ decisions are compared and balanced across teams. The key is ensuring your systems integrate smoothly, so data flows consistently across the entire employee lifecycle. By upgrading tools and configuring them to work together, technology shifts from being a silent risk to a safeguard that keeps job architecture working as intended.

The Missing Piece: Governance and Discipline

Even the best architecture with perfect processes and technology will fail without governance. Governance is the mechanism that embeds discipline into daily decisions and ensures the fairness of your structure shows up in the lived experience of your employees.

Troubleshooting Your Governance:

• Approval Guidelines: Do you have clear guidelines for starting salaries, promotions, and ad hoc pay increases? Have you established approval thresholds for higher-level review when those guidelines are exceeded?

• Audits & Reporting: Do you conduct regular audits of promotion rates and pay increases across demographic groups? Is this data part of your standard leadership reporting, or just during the annual merit process?

• Accountability: Are managers trained to apply the architecture consistently? More importantly, are they held accountable for doing so?

​​The solution here is to embed governance as an everyday practice, not a one-off exercise. This means regular audits, clear manager accountability, and making equity outcomes part of leadership reporting. It also involves creating forums where calibration and consistency are discussed openly, so managers know they are expected to apply the same standards across teams. When governance shapes how decisions are made, fairness turns from an idea into a reality employees can see.

Bringing It All Together

Job architecture lays the foundation, but it can’t carry the full weight of pay equity alone. Its true power is unlocked only when it is integrated with strong processes, modern technology, and disciplined governance. 

If you’ve built the right structure but are still finding inequities in pay, promotion, or performance, the problem likely isn’t your architecture. It’s time to scrutinize the processes and systems around it.

If that sounds familiar, let’s talk. We would love to help you troubleshoot these issues and get your organization to a place where fairness and consistency are more than just promises.