Position

A position is a job that exists in your company whether or not anybody is sitting in it: Production Supervisor, Quality Inspector, Accounts Officer. You create it once here, attach the pay structure and the appraisal form that go with the job, and from then on every employee who holds that job inherits both. This is the single most connected screen in PeopleNest.

Where

People Directory › Setup › Position

Who uses it

The implementation consultant, once per job title, then HR when a new job is created

When

Before the first employee is given an Organization Assignment

Needs first

Salary Structure and Evaluation Template, if you want the position to carry them

Shape

One record per job. No lines.

What it is for

Most HR systems let you type a job title straight onto the employee. That works until the day somebody asks "what does a Quality Inspector get paid" or "which appraisal form do all our supervisors fill". With a free text job title nobody can answer, because every record spells it differently and nothing is attached to it.

The Position screen turns the job title into a real thing you can hang rules on. A position holds two decisions that would otherwise have to be repeated on every single employee:

• which Salary Structure the job is paid against, and
• which Evaluation Template the holder is appraised on.

An employee then picks a position on Employee Organization Assignment, and both decisions arrive with it. Create a new Quality Inspector and you do not decide their pay structure or their appraisal form again, the position already decided.

Without positions the damage is quiet. The organisation chart cannot be drawn, because the reporting tree is built on the position, not on the name. Performance runs cannot find an appraisal form per person. Recruitment has nothing to requisition against. The job title becomes a label on a report and nothing more.

The one sentence that makes it click: the person comes and goes, the position stays. Everything in PeopleNest that must survive somebody resigning is held against the position.

Every field, in plain words

This screen has one tab and no grid. Five fields, and three of them matter a great deal.

Position

Field	What it means	What to put in it	Notes
Position	The short code for the job. It is how the job appears in every lookup across the product.	PRDSUP	Required. Must be unique. Keep it short and readable, you will see it on assignment screens and in requisitions. Set it once, it is the key other records point at.
Name	The job title in full, as HR and the employee would say it.	Production Supervisor	Required. This is what prints on the organisation chart, the appointment letter and the employee reports. Translations are kept per language, so a second language shows its own title.
Salary Structure	The pay structure the job is paid against: which wage types the holder earns, and in what shape.	MFG-SUP - Manufacturing Supervisory	Pick it from the list. It is copied onto the employee when this position is chosen on their Organization Assignment. See Salary Structure.
Evaluation Template	The appraisal form everybody holding this job is evaluated on.	TMPL-NONMGMT - Non Management Appraisal	Pick it from the list. The performance run reads it per employee through the position. See Evaluation Template.
Block	Retires the job without deleting it.	Leave it clear while the job is live. Tick it the day you stop hiring into it.	Ticking it stops the position being offered on new records. Employees who already hold it are untouched and their history stays readable.

Nothing on this screen fills itself in. All five values are yours.

About the Salary Structure field

This field is the reason the position matters to payroll. When somebody gives an employee this position on Employee Organization Assignment, the structure named here lands on that assignment, and the payroll run reads it from there.

Two consequences worth knowing before you go live:

• The assignment keeps its own copy of the structure. Changing the Salary Structure on the position later does not reach into assignments that are already saved. Those employees keep what they were given.
• You can leave it blank. A position with no Salary Structure is legal, the field is not required. Somebody then has to choose the structure by hand on every assignment, which is exactly the repeated decision this screen exists to remove.

About the Evaluation Template field

The appraisal form is resolved at the moment a performance run happens, not at the moment the employee is hired. The run looks at each employee's current Organization Assignment, finds their position, and takes the form from the position. If the position has no form, it falls back to the form named on the Performance Target Entity itself.

So this field gives you two valid ways to run appraisals, and you should choose one deliberately:

	Form on the position	Form on the target entity
How it works	Each position names its own appraisal form	Positions are left blank, one form is named for the whole group
Use it when	Supervisors, operators and officers are judged on genuinely different things	Everybody in a department fills the same form
Cost	One decision per job title, up front	One decision in total, but no variation

Mixing them is fine and common. Fill the field on the handful of positions that need their own form and leave the rest blank to inherit the group's form.

How to configure it

1. Create the Salary Structures you need first, one per pay shape rather than one per job. A 500 person factory usually needs four or five: workers, staff, supervisory, management, and contract.
2. Create the Evaluation Templates next, if appraisals are in scope for this phase. If they are not, leave the field blank on every position and come back to it.
3. Open Position. In Position type a short code, for example PRDSUP. Use a convention and stick to it, three letters for the area and three for the level reads well at a hundred positions.
4. In Name type the job title the way it is written on an appointment letter: Production Supervisor.
5. Pick the Salary Structure for the job. For a supervisor in the factory this is the supervisory structure, not the workers structure.
6. Pick the Evaluation Template, or leave it blank to let the performance target entity decide.
7. Leave Block clear and save.
8. Repeat for every job title that exists on paper. List them from the payroll register before you start, it is faster than discovering them one resignation at a time.
9. Once the positions exist, declare which combinations of Category, Position and Grade are legal on Position Structure, and only then start giving people their Organization Assignment.

Scenarios

We have three Production Supervisors, do we create three positions

No. One position, three employees holding it. The position is the job, not the seat and not the person. If all three are paid on the same structure and appraised on the same form, they share one position record.

Create a second position only when the job is genuinely different: Production Supervisor and Senior Production Supervisor are two positions if they are paid or judged differently. If the only difference is seniority and money, that difference belongs on the Position Grade instead, and both people keep the same position.

The same job title is paid differently in the factory and in the office

Decide which of the two differences you are actually describing.

If the work is the same and only the money differs, keep one position and let the pay come from the employee's own assignment, with the grade recording the level. If the work itself is different, create two positions with two names, for example Accounts Officer and Accounts Officer - Plant, each with its own structure.

The test: would you write two different appointment letters? Two letters, two positions.

A Production Supervisor is promoted to Shift Manager

Nothing happens on this screen. Both positions already exist. The change is made on the employee's Employee Organization Assignment, dated from the promotion date, naming the new position. The new position brings its own salary structure and appraisal form with it.

We want supervisors appraised on a different form from next cycle

Change the Evaluation Template on the Production Supervisor position. The next performance run resolves the new form for everybody in that position. Goal sheets that have already been generated keep the form they were created with until the run is done again.

We are closing a product line and the position will not exist any more

Tick Block. Do not try to remove the position. The people who held it, their appraisals, their payroll history and the organisation chart for last year all point at it, and all of that must stay readable. Blocking keeps the history and stops the position appearing when the next assignment is made.

What it is connected to

Must exist before this screen: nothing is strictly required. Salary Structure and Evaluation Template should exist first if you intend to use those two fields, which you should.

What reads the position:

• Employee Organization Assignment is the main consumer. It takes the position and copies the Salary Structure down onto the employee. It also builds the reporting tree, and it does so through the position, so an employee with no position does not appear on the organisation chart at all.
• Employee Basic Information shows the position on the employee record.
• Performance Target Entity resolves each employee's appraisal form from their position, with the target entity's own form as the fallback.
• Calibration and the performance dashboard group and compare people by position.
• Recruitment Requisition is raised for a position, which is how a vacancy knows what it is a vacancy for.
• Onboarding Checklist can be built per position, so a new supervisor gets a different checklist from a new operator.
• Training Schedule uses position to select who is nominated for a course.
• Succession Plan is held against the position, which is what lets a plan survive the current holder leaving.
• Position Structure and Position Task list positions on their lines.
• Position Planning budgets headcount for a position.
• Employee Professional Experience records which position a past role maps to.

What breaks if you change a position under a live employee:

• Renaming it is safe. Everything points at the code, so the new name simply appears everywhere the old one did, including on historical records.
• Changing the Salary Structure is safe for people already assigned, they keep the copy on their assignment. It only changes what the next assignment inherits. If you actually want existing employees moved onto a new structure, that has to be done on their assignments.
• Changing the Evaluation Template changes who is appraised on what from the next performance run onwards.
• Blocking it is safe. Clearing the position off a live employee's assignment is not, that employee drops out of the organisation chart.

If something looks wrong

• "The position list is empty when I try to assign somebody" - no positions have been created yet, or every one of them has Block ticked.
• "It will not let me save, it says the position already exists" - the code is already in use. Position codes must be unique. Check whether the job was created earlier under a slightly different name.
• "An employee is missing from the organisation chart" - they have no position on their current Organization Assignment. The chart is built through the position, so a blank position means the person is not drawn.
• "We changed the salary structure on the position but nobody's pay changed" - as designed. The structure was copied onto each employee's assignment when the position was chosen. Existing employees keep their copy, only new assignments pick up the change.
• "Everybody in the company got the same appraisal form" - the positions have no Evaluation Template, so the performance run fell back to the single form named on the target entity.