(2025-01-15) Procopio Fixing Tech Hiring Hell Starts With Smarter Job Titles

Joe Procopio: Fixing Tech Hiring Hell Starts With Smarter Job Titles. Here’s tip number one for all you hiring tech companies. If you don’t want 10,000 resumes in your inbox the first hour your job post is live, stop making that job post (job description) so vague it appeals to anyone and everyone. And that advice also extends to the generic, meaningless titles of the roles you’re hiring for.

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. (job market)

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.

So as far as fixing hiring is concerned, especially in the tech industry, nothing is going to change until the hiring tech companies fix this problem with bullshit job titles.

A couple months ago, I had a long conversation with a former startup founder about the tech industry and how she might break into

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.
“We both want to be the Chief Make The Company More Money Officer,” I said.

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. (product manager)

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?

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.
See, she and I have both spent a lot of time in “roles of convenience.”

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?

No. Right? Yeah. No.
Don’t blame that on HR.

I don’t lean on SEO or other tricks for my articles.
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.

So let me ask you something. Why are we using vague, meaningless job titles for the headlines of job posts instead of, you know, headlines?

I disagree, I think he's shown how messy the jobs are, you can't write a "better" "headline" for something like that. You (the company) have to figure out what you really want, what the relative priorities of those things are, etc. - right now we get the equivalent of Bad Strategy.