Roles & Career Levels
A Role describes a job in the abstract — "Backend Engineer" — separately from the individual positions that people are hired into. The role's definition stays the same no matter how many positions based on it exist or who currently holds them.
On its own, a list of roles is only job titles. Grouping roles into Role Families and placing them on Career Levels turns that list into a career framework: related roles sit together, the progression from one level to the next is explicit, and compensation bands hang off it. To connect pay to this framework, see Compensation Management.
Where to Find Roles, Families, and Career Levels
In the flair HR app, open the Company Structure tab. Alongside Position Management you will find three more tabs:
- Roles & Families — manage your roles and the families they are grouped under
- Career Levels — manage the ordered levels that roles sit at
- Org Chart — explore your company as a visual tree
This article covers the first two tabs. For the third, see Org Chart.
Working in the Roles & Families View
The Roles & Families tab is the Roles Builder. A sidebar on the left lists your role families with the number of roles in each; Expand all opens them, and a search box narrows the list when you have many.
Select a family and the main area shows its Code and Description, then its ROLES laid out as a career path — the roles in order, each with the career level it sits at underneath. Reading left to right gives you the progression through that family at a glance.
Until you pick something, flair prompts you with "Select a role family from the sidebar to view its roles." and, once a family is open, "Select a role to view its details."
Use New Role Family to add a family, and New Role to add a role to the family you have open. Each family also has edit and delete actions.
What a Role Holds
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Role Code | A unique identifier for the role. |
| Career Level | Required. The level this role sits at. |
| Role Family | Optional. The family it is grouped under. |
| Available From / Available To | The window during which the role can be used; flair works out whether the role is currently active from these dates. |
| Description, Responsibilities, Expectations | Rich text describing the role. |
You don't need to maintain a separate "active" flag. Set Available From and Available To to the window during which the role can be used, and flair works out from those dates whether it is currently active.
Generating a Position from a Role
The important action in this view is Generate Position. It creates a position from the role so you don't re-enter the same details by hand — the description, responsibilities, and expectations you already wrote for the role carry over.
To generate a position:
- In the Roles & Families view, select the role you want to hire into.
- Click Generate Position.
The generated position then behaves like any other: see Creating & Managing Positions for the full position lifecycle.
Editing and Deleting
The remaining actions in this view work as their names suggest:
- Edit Role — change the selected role's fields
- Delete Role — remove the selected role
- Edit Role Family — change the selected family
- Delete Role Family — remove the selected family
Role Families
A Role Family keeps related roles together so a growing framework stays navigable. One short illustration: an engineering family with "Backend Engineer" as one of its roles.
A family carries:
- Code
- Description
Grouping a role under a family is optional — the Role Family field on the role decides where it appears.
Career Levels
Career Levels are ordered, so the progression from one level to the next is explicit rather than implied by naming conventions. Every role must sit at a level — Career Level is a required field on the role — which is what turns your roles into a ladder rather than a list.
Next Steps
- Generate your first position from a role, then manage it in Creating & Managing Positions
- See the resulting structure at a glance in the Org Chart