Job Titles
Ashley Cooper, Editor-in-Chief @ TalentBroker's Recruity Substack
What I find amazing is the power of job titles and their ability to skew people’s thoughts either to or away from a particular candidate when they apply for a job.
I always wanted a top role in a newspaper so launching this blog and calling myself Editor-in-Chief should set me up nicely. What do you think?
The fact is that context is king.
In one regard inflating one’s job title gets you a foot in the door but at the same time it sets you up to fail at interview.
Recruitment Agencies are particularly bad
I hate singling out recruiters because I am one and they get a bad rap, but, they are really easy for me to beat up and use as examples. However many sectors suffer this, especially sales led ones.
I see so many recruiters with something like Head of Blockchain or Director of Emerging Markets as a job title and instantly they lose credibility as far as I am concerned.
Now I know there are always going to be superstars especially in Tech and I have personally worked with some extremely clever relatively inexperienced young leaders, but in recruiting come on!
Most recruiters don’t start to get really good until they have matured a bit and slogged it out for about 8/10 years. Being a good recruiter or leader requires wisdom and experience, these are not mutually exclusive to success if you measure on revenue generated for example as most agencies do. Revenue generated means nothing inhouse.
Wisdom and experience, you know the relevant practical type is vital to become a “Head of something” in most disciplines or industries in my book.
So why do some sectors especially recruitment and TA crank out these inflated job titles? True it’s not just agencies, I do see it creeping in internally as well.
I believe in most of these obvious cases they are actually doing more damage to both their personal brand and the company, they would likely fair much better with grounded titles.
I can see a reason for doing it but it’s misleading and frankly I often feel like they are insulting my intelligence. So.
Nobody wants to deal with a Junior Recruiter or Trainee Recruiter (at least not when paying a 20k recruitment fee). But Recruiter is just fine.
Nobody believes that the justification for a 20k fee is because our “Head of” (who is 22 and only had 1 job in their life) is dealing with the search.
Internally these inflated job titles create hierarchical structures that breed contempt and turn competitiveness into high churn.
Companies with these sometimes ridiculous nomenclatures can be viewed as a bit tin pot.
More importantly getting your next job can become more challenging, and actually this works the other way as well.
Countless people are viewed as not senior enough because they don’t have the job title appropriate to the role they perform.
Do you think your job title is an accurate reflection of your experience and seniority?
There is nothing wrong with starting an enterprise and being the MD/CEO at 25 however if your reason for giving your staff inflated titles is to keep them on board, newsflash, all you are doing is setting up churn.
Try this
Try keeping a flatter org structure and you could be surprised with the results.
Try ignoring job titles when you start to review resumes and focus on what that person is doing, then, at what level they are operating and you might find that those hard to find people have already applied!
These are of course only my opinions, what’s yours?