Notice Concerning Title Inflation Reading
A person reads a job posting with a title that does not match the responsibilities described. They read several more. The titles continue not to match.
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A job search is in progress. It has been in progress for three weeks. The person conducting it has reviewed forty-seven postings across six platforms and has arrived at a question that is not answerable by any single search: what does any of these titles actually mean.
The First Observation
Title inflation reading is the practice of parsing a job title in relation to the description that follows it, and finding that the two occupy different planes of ambition. A posting titled Senior Manager of Strategic Initiatives requires ownership of a single reporting tool and coordination with one external vendor. A posting titled Lead Analyst of Digital Transformation requires basic Excel proficiency and comfort with weekly status meetings.
The title does not describe the job. The job description describes the job. The title was written for a different purpose.
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Three Consequences
The first consequence is calibration loss. The person reading has reviewed enough titles to no longer trust any of them as information. When a posting titled Director of Operations describes a genuinely senior role with significant scope, it is read with the same skepticism applied to the posting titled Director of Operations that required answering phones and managing one direct report.
The second consequence is search difficulty. Job title search filters require the person to know what title the employer used, not what title describes the work they want. The title vocabulary is not shared between job seekers and employers. The filters surface postings using the employer's vocabulary, not the seeker's.
The third consequence is interview recalibration. The person reading has begun to suspect that the title is aspirational and the description is operational, and that neither was written by the same person who will conduct the interview.
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The Governing Rule
Titles expand to occupy whatever status a market will accept without resistance. The resistance, in this case, is the person reading. The resistance is noted. The reading continues.
The Contradiction
The title is the first thing the person sees. It is also, frequently, the least informative element in the posting, having been written to attract attention rather than to describe scope. A posting with an accurate and modest title appears less desirable than a posting with an inflated title for equivalent work. The inflation therefore serves the employer's interests at the cost of the job seeker's ability to assess what is being offered.
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The search continues. The answer to that last query was not found.