Tech Employers: Please Get Smarter With Your Job Titles

Here’s a tip for all you tech companies that are hiring: If you don’t want 10,000 resumes in your inbox the first hour your job post is live, stop making that job description so vague that it appeals to anyone and everyone. 

About a week ago, I wrote a piece detailing my own personal job search hell, and concluded that the problem wasn’t just the way we’re now forced to look for a job these days, but also the way the job itself is positioned, packaged, and presented to the job-seeking public.

Now, while I do indeed have some larger concepts to address, I need to start off just like I do when I consult for broken companies. Before we get to the fixes, we all need to come together and reach maximum honesty and transparency.

Wait. Did I say fun and lucrative? I’m sorry. I meant the hoops she’d have to jump through to avoid becoming a cog in the endless unwanted new feature machine that has replaced innovation and strategy in the tech industry.

She and I are both trying to get to the same place—making companies more successful by building more successful products—but coming at it from different sides, me from tech, her from consumer product.

But based on our combined decades of experience, months of recent research, and the hundreds of use cases we’d both found in the form of companies who need help but, from their outward appearance anyway, don’t know what kind of help they need, we concluded a few things, and one truism stood out.

Sure, the “product” role doesn’t mean much anymore, specifically from the innovation and strategy sides, but honestly, neither do any of the rest of the standard leadership roles you’re going to find in your average tech company corporate structure. Hell, not just tech companies, but most companies.

I mean, sales is still sales and coders still code, I guess. But come on, in 2025, what does the Chief Executive Officer even do? Are they raising money? Forging partnerships? Leading the teams? All of it? Do they need a Co-CEO to help do half of it? A COO for the day-to-day? What about developing the product and generating the revenue? Should they be more like a CPO? Or a CMO? Do they need to be someone specifically in charge of innovating and strategizing?

Like most problems that are difficult to wrap your brain around—in this case, the problem of finding and hiring the right talent, and the subsequent job seeker’s problem with finding and applying to the right role—it starts at the very top of the corporate structure and trickles down.

Here’s what I mean: We both ideate, research, develop, build, test, and refine great, innovative products that need to be strategically successful for the company to grow and prosper. We do this to make top and bottom lines expansive and profitable, to make customers happy and loyal, and to turn average companies into places that people want to work for and with.

So… Chief Product Officer covered it for a while, so did Chief Innovation Officer, though sillier sounding. Maybe Chief Strategy Officer or maybe Chief of Staff, but at times we’ve also been CEO, Co-CEO, COO, CMO… 

In 2025, outside of the selling and the making, it’s all kind of blended. You can take almost any of those roles, or their derivative roles, and slap the same boilerplate job descriptions and the same bullet-point duties and requirements and whatever, throw that into the LinkedIn machine, and you’ll get 10,000 resumes in five minutes.

So the question comes up. When the company looks to hire a standard role under any of those leadership divisions—from operations to marketing to product to strategy and so forth—does the company actually know what they’re looking for?

A quick aside: As a writer, I could write the best, most awesome article ever, something everyone would want to read (maybe this one?), but if my editor and I don’t come up with a headline that tells the reader exactly what they’re going to get while also making that headline compelling enough to draw in people who will most benefit, without being clickbait, no one will read it. And if we cheat and make it clickbait, everyone will read it and no one will get anything out of it and they’ll never come back.

We’re all stuck in this quagmire of companies needing help and not knowing how to get what they need, and exceptional help sitting right there on the sidelines unable to find and stand out for those roles they might be perfect for.

So let’s start there. It’s not a solution, but it’s maximum honesty, and I feel like the first company that scraps a now-meaningless job title and publishes a job post with a decent headline is going to be far more likely to find exactly who they’re looking for with half the headache. 

All it takes is one to succeed, and you know the rest will fall in line. That’s how business works.  I’ll be on the lookout for it, and please join my email list while I propose more solutions to this and other industry problems.