Donna Morris, Adobe chief human resources officer and executive vice president of employee experience, laid out the challenge the firm faced when it embarked on its ambitious goal one year ago. “Adobe had historically taken a very broad approach to our job structure, and, as a result, it was difficult to compare pay when individuals performing different jobs and requiring different skills and capabilities were grouped in the same job family,” Morris says. “Recognizing that this was a barrier to performing an accurate review of our employees’ pay, we embarked on an exercise we called job architecture.”
In undergoing this job architecture process, Adobe came up with many new job categories and placed employees in categories that more accurately reflected their job responsibilities, Morris says. “It was a long and painstaking process, but this foundation was essential to making appropriate comparisons, both internally and with external market data…,” she says.
One strategy that Adobe has adopted for its entire global workforce mirrors what some U.S. cities and states have done--prohibit recruiters from asking potential hires about salary history during interviews. “One of the largest changes we’ve made to ensure ongoing parity is eliminating the practice of asking candidates for their salary histories,” Morris says. “This adds some extra complexity in our recruiting process, but it is the only reliable way of ensuring that we don’t carry over inequities that may have existed in prior companies.”