QUADRANCE

Grading as black box.

Walk into any compensation review and you’ll hear the same question from the board: why is this role graded the way it is? In traditional systems, the honest answer is often uncomfortable - because a consultant said so, or because that’s what the model produced. The reasoning sits inside a proprietary weighting scheme no one outside the vendor has ever seen.

For years, opacity was the industry standard. Compensation teams lived with it because the alternative - building from scratch - wasn’t practical. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, that calculus is changing fast.

Anchored in ESCO and O*NET.

Axiomera is built on ESCO - the European Commission’s multilingual taxonomy covering over 3,000 occupations and 13,800 skills across 27 EU languages - and O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor’s occupational database that has classified American roles for more than two decades.

These aren’t proprietary labels or synthetic training data assembled to look convincing. They’re the same reference frameworks Eurostat, national statistical offices, and employment ministries across Europe already use. When Axiomera classifies a role, it’s speaking the language regulators already speak.

Every score, visible.

Article 4 of Directive 2023/970 is explicit: pay structures must be based on objective, gender-neutral evaluation criteria measuring skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Our four-dimension framework maps directly to those requirements - not as an afterthought, but as the core architecture.

For every role you grade, you see how the total breaks down. What 120 points of responsibility actually represent. Why skills weight 105 in this case and not 80. Which working conditions factored in, and how much they moved the result. No opaque weightings. No hidden features pulled from a model you can’t inspect.

The four required criteria are where most grading stops. But your organisation likely cares about more - a professional certification that matters in finance, a clearance that matters in defence, a language requirement on European roles. Those become custom criteria you add on top, visible in the same audit trail, weighted the way you decide.

Defensible. By design.

A graduate analyst and a Chief Financial Officer sit at opposite ends of almost any pay structure, but the same methodology evaluates both. One audit trail covers entry-level roles, C-suite positions, and everything in between - applied consistently across your entire organisation, not just the roles that happened to be easy to benchmark.

When an employee asks how their role was graded, when a works council requests the methodology behind a pay structure, when a regulator reviews your gender pay gap report - the answer is the same documented file, built the same way, for every role you’ve ever graded.