Make Sense of Inconsistent Job Titles

When to use it

The prompt

Here are job titles I'm seeing on resumes or in a target company list: {{paste the titles one per line, with the company type, size and country beside each if you know them — e.g. "Senior Engineer, 30-person seed startup, Berlin"}} THE ROLE I'M HIRING FOR: {{Job Title}}, {{level}}, plus one sentence on what that level means at our company For each title, tell me: 1. What it most likely means in actual scope and level, given the company context. 2. Whether it's probably inflated, deflated or genuinely ambiguous, and why. 3. One question I could ask on a screening call to settle the ambiguity quickly. Then: 4. Which titles are probably equivalent to each other despite reading differently. 5. Where country or industry conventions change the meaning — "Vice President" or "Associate" at a bank, "Analyst" in consulting, the level ladders at large IT services firms, and the like. 6. Any title that may be a recent relabel rather than a change in the work, such as a software engineer retitled "AI Engineer" after adding one LLM feature. 7. A simple mapping onto our levels, so I can compare these people like for like, marked wherever you're guessing.

Tip

Title inflation runs one way at startups and the other way at large non-tech employers, where a genuinely senior person can sit under a generic HR-wide grade. Both distort a title-based screen, in opposite directions.

How to use it

Paste the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or whichever assistant you use, then replace every {{bracketed}} part with your own detail. The more specific and messier your input, the better the output — a model given raw notes has more to work with than one given a tidy summary you wrote first.

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