The Jobscore system is a universal system in that it is designed to measure jobs of all types at all levels, in organisations of all sizes, across all industry sectors. This design philosophy allows the relative size of jobs to be compared both within and across organisations. This in turn allows salary levels for jobs that are common to many industries to be compared. Such jobs include for example those in finance and accounting positions, administration, human resources management, and information services.

To achieve cross-organisation comparability of assessments, the Jobscore system also measures characteristics of the organisation that contains the job. These characteristics are: size as measured by total annual revenue (or budget for not-for-profit organisations); the industry sector in which it operates; the diversity of its products and services; and the diversity of its markets. These factors influence the complexity of managing the organisation, and hence the level of skill required by its employees.

To enable evaluation of a wide spectrum of job types a wide range of skill types are measured by the system. Not all skills represented in the Jobscore system are therefore applicable to every type of job. In these cases, the factors carry zero weight in the final assessment for the job.

Many job evaluation systems consist of progressive tables of figures corresponding to the levels present for each aspect of a job it measures. Consider by way of example a very simple system that examines just two aspects of a job, education level, and responsibility (however defined). The system may include four levels of education and three levels of responsibility with a score attached to each level within each factor, as follows: