Compare a class spec's minimum qualifications against other agencies or against your own classes, and see where your requirements line up or diverge.

What Is Qualification Standards Analysis?

Comparing minimum qualifications across specs can be slow work. Traditionally, you had to open each comparable spec, find its education, experience, and certification language, and line it all up against your own.

The Qualification Standards Analysis assembles that comparison for you. Holly reads the comparators in your comparison set and reports what each one requires for education, experience, certifications, and licensing, next to what your spec requires. The results also cover where comparators allow substitutions, such as a certification in place of a degree, how your salary range relates to the requirements you are asking for, and what Holly suggests retaining or reconsidering.

You can run it two ways:

• From the Market tab, to compare your spec against similar positions at other agencies

• From the Internals tab, to compare your spec against other classes within your own agency

Use the Market version for market positioning and the Internals version for internal equity and career ladder consistency.

Note: This analysis uses AI to summarize and compare qualification language across specs. It is a starting point for a classification judgment, not the judgment itself. Review the findings before sharing them or including them in any decisions.

Common Use Cases

Defending a Minimum Qualification Under Pressure

Someone wants the bachelor's degree requirement removed so they can widen the applicant pool. The analysis tells you how many of your comparators require a degree for the same work, so the conversation runs on your comparator data rather than on competing instincts.

Removing a Requirement That Is Screening People Out

The opposite case is just as common. If almost none of your comparators require the degree you require, you have the evidence to take that barrier out and the documentation to show why.

Supporting a Reclassification or Internal Equity Review

The Internals version compares a class against your own classifications and assesses whether its requirements are consistent with comparable classes at the same level. It also looks at whether the requirements leave a workable promotion path from the classes that feed into it.

Running This Analysis

The Qualification Standards Analysis runs on one spec at a time, from the Analyze menu on the spec's Market or Internals tab. For the general steps and information, see 📄 How to Run an Analysis on a Class Specification.

Two things are specific to this analysis:

• It reads your comparison set, so build that set first. Holly only analyzes the comparators included for the spec. Add or remove comparators before you run it, and on the Market tab, check which ones are toggled on, since a comparator toggled off stays visible but is left out. See 📄 How to Add and Manage Comparator Specs.

• Run it from the tab that matches your question. The Market tab compares against other agencies. The Internals tab compares against your own classes. The menu item is named the same in both places.

Understanding Your Results

Both versions of the analysis open with the same four sections:

1. Job Overview — How Holly read your spec: the level of the role, its scope, who it reports to, and whether it carries supervisory responsibility. Read this first. Everything below it rests on Holly having placed the role correctly.

2. Key Responsibilities — The duties Holly used as the basis for judging whether your requirements fit the work.

3. Benchmark Position Summary — Each comparator in your set, with the education, experience, certification, and licensing requirements it carries and its salary range. This is the section to check when someone asks where a number came from.

4. Benchmark Analysis Summary — The comparison itself, broken out by education, experience, certifications, substitution patterns, and salary, reported as proportions of your comparator group.

From there, the two versions answer different questions.

Market tab results

• Market Positioning Assessment places your requirements against the entry, journey, and senior level patterns in your comparator group, then states which level your spec matches.

Internals tab results

• Internal Equity Positioning Assessment appears three times, once each for entry, mid, and senior level, showing where your spec falls against your own classifications at that level.

• Internal Equity Assessment says whether your requirements are consistent with comparable classes in your agency, and how the class differentiates from the lead classes below it and the management classes above it.

• Internal Mobility Considerations checks whether your requirements leave a usable promotion path from the classes that feed into this one.

• Recommendations states what to retain and what to reconsider, with the comparator count behind each point, and flags where the evidence is too thin to recommend a change.

Reading the comparison

Benchmark Analysis Summary reports each requirement as a proportion of your comparator group, such as 14 of 15 requiring a bachelor's degree. Read those proportions against your own spec:

• Comparators require more than you do. Consider raising your requirement, or document why your class is different.

• Comparators require roughly what you do. Your requirement is defensible as written.

• Comparators require less than you do. Your requirement may be screening out qualified candidates. Consider removing or softening it, unless law or regulation requires it.

Watch the substitution patterns. If your comparators let a certification stand in for a degree and your spec does not, adding that pathway is often easier to get agreement on than removing the requirement.

Recommendations is drawn from the comparators you selected and nothing else, so change the comparison set and the recommendations change with it. A requirement that looks out of step may still be justified by something the comparison cannot see, such as a state mandate. When that is the case, document the reasoning in the spec.