The job title is probably the HR element whose importance is most underestimated, when it matters as much to the organisation as it does to the employee who bears it.
Imagine for a moment that each colleague decided to name you according to their own logic. You would be Isabelle to some, Isa to others, "the lady from accounting" to a third. Would that be conceivable?
Yet this is exactly what we do, without clear governance, with job titles. Everyone names things in their own way, according to their understanding of the organisation, their culture, their view of the function.
I once received, for a job evaluation, an email mentioning a function in the body of the message, an attachment carrying a different title, and a third title in the org chart.
What a job title carries
Before governing it, you need to grasp fully what a job title actually carries.
It is above all a GPS. To serve this purpose, it must deliver three pieces of information instantly: the role, meaning the content of the function (example: accountant), the level of the person (example: director, analyst), and the scope (example: global, Italy).
It carries an honorific dimension. It touches on ego, on the business card, on recognition. To deny this would be naive: a title tells the person what the organisation recognises in them.
It sometimes has a legal reach. Some functions are not a matter of free naming. The DPO must be designated because GDPR requires it. In regulated sectors, such as banking and insurance, some functions must be designated and approved by the regulator, which constrains their title. The title then refers to a regulated function, designated and monitored, which cannot be renamed or displayed without the function and the job holder being accredited.
It must also remain inclusive. The words in a title are not neutral, and some are false friends. "Junior" and "senior" are the most common examples. They seem easy to place, but they actually refer to an underlying idea of age or experience, whereas a title should describe a function. Moreover, they generate an inconsistency: you come across "juniors" with long tenure, and the reverse.
The title is also cultural. The same word does not carry the same weight from one country to another, and we will come back to this.
In reality, a title is never neutral.
It is because it carries all of this that the title cannot be treated as a label. And yet it remains the poor relation in our organisations: an object with strong impact, rarely governed with rigour.
One word, several uses
If, even with governance, a job title nomenclature is so difficult to maintain, it is because a single word actually carries several uses.
As long as these uses are not distinguished, you will face requests to change the rules, or a failure to follow them depending on each person's angle.
The temptation is to look for the perfect title, the one that would serve all these needs at once. This is a dead end. No single word can be at once rigorous for data, meaningful day to day, valued externally and attractive at recruitment. It is simpler, and healthier, to accept several titles, one per use, than to exhaust a single name asked to carry everything.
In practice, I distinguish four main uses of the job title.
The title linked to job architecture
This is the title that serves to organise and compare, the one that takes on meaning within the job architecture I described in another article in this series, “A job architecture cannot be the aggregate of a client portfolio”. It must be rigorous and consistent, because this is the title that allows the data to speak to one another. This is where inconsistency costs the most.
The cultural bias is most visible here. Some words do not read the same way across countries. Moving from analyst to specialist can be seen as a promotion in one culture, and as a step back in another. A "Partner", in England, often holds a share of the company. A "Manager" without a team is unthinkable in France, yet common in the United States. And some cultures, in Asia in particular, need intermediate steps, meaning a visible change of title between two levels, to support a career progression.
The internal signature title
This is the day-to-day title: intranet, email signature, directory. It serves the readability of the organisation for those who work within it.
It can be more flexible, more meaningful than the architecture title, especially on content. Where the architecture groups functions into categories, the internal signature can name the role in a more precise and more recognisable way. But it must remain consistent with the architecture. When the signature title drifts away from the architecture title, the organisation begins to lose sight of itself.
The external title
This is the title turned outward: business card, public professional profile. It is sometimes left to the employee's discretion, sometimes managed by the company.
This is where the bias towards inflation most often settles. The external title tends to grow, because it serves the image one has of oneself.
The job advert title
This is the recruitment title, the job advert. It works with a constraint of its own: the language of the market, the local language, and the "trendy" titles that come and go.
It has its share of culture and attractiveness, and this is legitimate. But it must keep a clear link with the architecture title that sits behind it, failing which the company recruits on a word that corresponds to no internal reality. This is where, for example, words set aside internally, such as junior or senior, can find their place again in a job advert title if they speak to the market.
In practice
There is no need to overhaul each of these uses from top to bottom as a first step. It is however useful to work the architecture title in relation to the internal signature title. The job advert title is revised regularly, to follow linguistic requirements or market evolutions. As for the external title, the company sometimes does not address it at all.
The essentials
Treating the title as a mere label means accepting that the data no longer speaks to one another, and that the recognition it carries is distributed at random.
Rather than exhausting a single title asked to carry everything, you accept several, one per use: architecture, internal signature, external, job advert. This is what allows accurate naming at each place, without giving up on data rigour, on meaning, or on attractiveness. Wanting a single name for everything, on the contrary, means condemning yourself to permanent conflicts.
This is the distinction of uses that the HDH (HR Decision Hub) platform integrates in the way it handles job titles, so that each use is served without compromising the others.