(Don’t) Call Me Names
At some point in our lives, we’ve all browsed job openings as professionals looking to join an organization in some role compliant with our skills and qualifications. Or, some of us have been in the shoes of those who are hunted for — by recruiters. Either way, we’ve likely been confused by exposure to the foggy cloud of job titles, as we wanted to get clarity and to map titles or job descriptions to what we, as persons and professionals, expect to bring to the table for an organization that hires us.
Take a look at these word chains, for instance:
- SCRUM Master. Agile Coach. Product Owner. Team Lead.
2. System Architect. Senior Developer. Junior Developer.
3. Talent Acquisition Manager. Human Resource Manager. Chief Culture Officer.
4. Sales Associate. Client Manager. Marketing Assistant.
Do you see a similarity between the titles in each of the chains? Chain 1) would suggest that this organization uses the “code” job titles to fill in the roles that perform some overseeing/managerial/people-related function in the technical/production division of the company. Chain 2) is about purely technical skills. Although, I’ve seen how the job titles of Senior Developer and System Architect imply some team lead-ish expectations from a hiring organization. Chains 3) and 4) respectively are about working with people in the company, and people outside the company, but do those titles provide enough information for a candidate on what is expected of them? Obviously, no.
What I’m getting at is this: the typical paradigm for title-based hiring has proven to be not only confusing and misleading. It just takes a lot of time. Of course, those titles come with job descriptions, but why a candidate has to sift through the many descriptions only to get a quick understanding on whether this organization might be a good fit for for them, in whichever capacity?
Perhaps a better approach would be to create some sort of funnels. They use funnels in marketing and sales to qualify leads, and those sales funnels are often automated. What I suggest looking into is a non-automated hiring funnel. Of course, professional social networks have created the AI-based funnels, but they often don’t do what’s expected of them, and turn out to be a waste of time as well, for many reasons, not to be covered in this brief article.
With funnels, there’s always forking, as shown here:
Ideally, both as a job candidate and as a hiring organization we would want the process of forking to be as smooth as possible, and for that we would need to construct a set of questions/pointers, and — unlike with the titles — those questions/pointers would be person-based. For instance, the first question to ask could be this: do you see yourself in a managerial/overseeing/people-related role? Or: are you a techie, the one who wants nothing to do with managing people? And, the funnels will fork and fork, until they drip into a set of skills and aspirations of this person, showing how they might be a fit for any available role.
I haven’t aimed at providing an extensive account on how to build the efficient person-based hiring funnels here. This write-up is just a thought-twister that might help see how the established paradigm of hiring — rooted in the work culture of the last century — has outlived itself.
