Job title ‘inflation’ is quietly devaluing your organisation

Somewhere in Lagos this morning, a Marketing Executive is beginning her career. She has come through a graduate trainee programme, she carries a deposit mobilisation target, and her branch manager is watching her numbers closely.

“….When everyone is a Vice President, capability stops being the measure.”

At another place in London, a Marketing Executive is closing her week rather differently, because she owns the brand budget, sets the commercial strategy, and reports directly to the founder of the business. The title on each of their business cards is identical, yet the altitude at which each of them operates could not be more different.

This is not merely an interesting curiosity; it is a structural feature of the global labour market, and it is quietly costing organisations money, talent, and opportunity.

Job titles behave like a currency, and like any currency, their value changes at every border they cross. In Nigerian banking, the title of Marketing Executive denotes an entry-level grade, whereas in a UK boutique consultancy, it can denote the most senior marketing voice in the entire business. The United Kingdom produces the same contradictions within its own borders. A Vice President in a London investment bank sits several floors below the executive suite, while a Vice President in a scale-up may be second only to the founder. An Associate in a City law firm is in the early years of her career, whereas an Associate in a surveying practice has usually spent a decade earning that single word. In the NHS, the title of Consultant represents the summit of a medical career, while elsewhere in the corporate world, it is occasionally little more than a laptop and a confident handshake.

Despite all of this, recruitment in Nigeria and abroad continues to worship the nameplate. We screen for titles as though they were regulated, when in reality they are self-declared, unstandardised, and untranslatable across sectors, structures, and borders. Anyone can print the word Director on a business card, but not everyone can show you what they have actually directed.

For executives, this matters in at least three commercial arenas.

The first is cross-border hiring. As Nigerian institutions expand regionally and international firms build their African operations, CVs are crossing borders faster than the frameworks used to read them. A Nigerian Manager who ran a regional profit and loss account, opened new markets, and built a team from nothing is routinely screened out by a UK hiring system that has been calibrated to expect the word Director at that level of accountability. The reverse also happens, because inflated foreign titles are imported at face value and priced accordingly. Both errors are expensive, since one overlooks proven capability while the other overpays for packaging.

The second is diaspora talent. Nigeria’s most valuable returning professionals often carry titles that undersell them, precisely because those titles were earned in flat, lean structures where the scope of the work outran the nomenclature attached to it. Boards that read the door plate rather than the track record will continue to lose these candidates to competitors who ask better questions.

The third is mergers, partnerships, and joint ventures. When two organisations integrate, title equivalence becomes a matter of governance, because someone must establish who genuinely holds decision rights and whose Head of Department is actually the head of anything at all. Integrations stall not because capability is absent, but because the map of titles bears little relation to the territory of accountability.

The correction is not complicated, although it does require discipline. A skills-first approach interrogates scope rather than rank. It asks what a person owned, which market they opened, and which numbers moved on their watch that would not have moved without them. A CV should be read like a set of accounts rather than a guest list, because impressive names are pleasant, but it is the movement between the lines that tells the truth.

In practical terms, this demands three shifts. Organisations should build role architectures around accountabilities and deliverables rather than inherited grade labels, so that titles describe the work rather than decorate it. They should train hiring managers and search partners to translate titles across markets in the way a treasurer translates currencies, with a published exchange rate rather than a guess. Finally, when assessing senior candidates, they should weigh demonstrated exposure, including the budgets held, the teams built, and the markets entered, above the words printed on the letterhead.

Titles will always exist, and they serve a legitimate purpose, because they signal, they motivate, and they flatter. Nevertheless, a title is borrowed from the organisation, while expertise belongs to the person. Titles are a currency whose exchange rate changes at every border, but skills are the only currency that never needs converting.

Jennifer Oyelade MIRP is the director of Transquisite Consulting Group, an international HR strategy and executive search consultancy operating across the UK, Nigeria, and Sub-Saharan Africa