The Job Titles Are Out Of Control

One of the worst kinds of candidates for a Recruiter to deal with are those that are hung up on job titles.

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Let me get this out in the open:

In most cases anyway.

The job title is the first thing any applicant sees when looking at a job, and sometimes, for candidates caught up on chasing titles, it’s also the last.

I understand. Everyone wants to feel as though, when they are moving positions, they are moving up and becoming more senior. I’ve had Technical Support Team Leads who have said they didn’t want to talk to me about anything less than a Management position.

Be wary of assuming this kind of attitude. Had this person stopped to talk to me or read the job description, they would have realized that the Team Lead position I was calling about was more senior, included greater responsibility, would have allowed them to put new technologies on their resume and would have been an increase in pay.

Oh well. That’s one less resume on the pile.

Because not all job titles are created equally. One company’s IT Manager is another company’s Senior Help Desk Support Technician. One company’s AVP is another company’s Team Lead and so on.

I once scheduled a meeting with a Director of IT at a Toronto law firm. I went into the meeting well groomed, well prepared and with the gleam of dollar signs in my eyes.

On site this man informed me that he was the company’s only internal IT resource. Here I was thinking I was meeting a senior decision maker. Turns out he was a Senior Support Analyst who knew how to look after the admin side of being a Manager. The meeting was a bust. Shouldn’t have listened to the job title.

Granted, some companies do take job titles very seriously for the purposes of internal administration. The job title is used to determine which pay band a position will fall into. A Manager is worth this, a Director is worth this, an AVP is worth this, etc.

But more often than not our society’s obsession with titles has reduced most of them to no more than irrelevant verbage. I’ve met Managers who don’t manage anyone, Directors who don’t direct anything and AVPs who don’t assist anyone. For some banks, a Manager title doesn’t indicate much more than that you’re one or two steps higher than the person who cleans the washrooms.

When I got my first job out of school in Toronto, my boss asked me what I wanted my title to be. I chose Sales Executive. No need for anyone to know that we were two guys working out of the back of a house and that I was an Administrative Assistant at best. I never sold anything. I never negotiated a contract. I never executed a single project. I had a nice title though.

And that’s what most job title’s amount to. They are instant psychological gratification to make employees feel better about their position. You can call your Receptionist a Manager of First Impressions or Director of First Contact but, at the end of the day, to quote Shakespeare, a rose by any other name…

So next time a Recruiter calls, don’t get caught up in the job title. Instead concern yourself with the scope of the duties and responsibilities, the size of the environment, the potential for growth; anything tangible. And at the very least, if the only thing standing between you accepting an offer is whether or not it has the word Senior in your title, ask if it can be changed. Most companies won’t lose good talent over one word. Don’t be so quick to lose a good job over the same thing.