The title inflation nobody wants to name

Across ER&D and IT centres, a ‘Head of’ today can mean a leader owning a 100-person function with real P&L influence, or an individual contributor with an impressive card and a team of 3. ‘Director’ spans a similar chasm. The title still carries weight in the room and on LinkedIn, but as a description of actual scope it’s become nearly uninformative. Title inflation has run ahead of the mandates the titles were meant to signal. At senior level, pay is increasingly tied to outcomes rather than labels, Deloitte finds roughly 60% of top-executive earnings now performance-linked, with CXO pay up 7–11%, which only sharpens the cost of pricing off a title instead of a mandate.

Nobody wants to name it because everyone benefits locally. Candidates want the elevated title; centres hand them out to close offers without moving comp; parents tolerate it because it’s cheaper than a raise, and nobody has the hiring-authority conversation that would force the title to match the mandate it implies. Each individual decision is rational. The aggregate is a market where the words on a business card have quietly stopped meaning a consistent thing, and we all keep using them as though they do.

The error travels. When a mis-labelled leader moves on, the next employer inherits the title as fact. Someone who ran a team of 3 carries ‘Head of’ onto the next CV, the next hiring committee benchmarks against it, and now two organisations are pricing the same inflated word. It picks up a little credibility at every stop, because a title that has survived two employers reads as verified. That’s the quiet mechanism: nobody audits the label, so it hardens into a fact simply by being repeated.

This is how a market loses a shared vocabulary without a single decision to do it. Every centre nudges the word half a step to close one offer, and a thousand small nudges add up to a signal that no longer signals. Systems drift like this whenever every local incentive points one way and no one owns the aggregate. The benchmark everyone trusts ends up assembled from everyone else’s compromises, which is why you can’t fix it by comparing more titles. You fix it by going underneath the title, at your own end, on your own hire.

The damage is concrete. When you hire a ‘Head of’ and benchmark them against ‘Head of’ comp, you’re comparing against a title that now covers wildly different realities, so you either overpay for an inflated label or lowball a genuine one, and you often can’t tell which until they’re 6 months in, well past the point where senior onboarding as a 90-day trust exercise could have caught the gap early. The same inflation makes candidates hard to read: a strong operator with a modest title looks junior, and an inflated title masks a thin mandate. The signal you relied on has degraded. The underlying market is genuinely moving, too, Naukri’s JobSpeak index shows the senior 20-lakh-plus band up about 16% over the year, so a title that mis-states scope mis-prices a real, shifting market.

The field notes suggest the fix is to stop trusting the label as data. Hire the mandate, interrogate the actual scope, the real span, the decisions genuinely owned, and pay against that. There’s a craft lesson that transfers cleanly here. Editors have long told writers that adjectives are the cheapest words on the page and the verbs carry the meaning; Stephen King built half of On Writing around stripping out the modifiers until only the load-bearing words are left. A senior profile reads the same way. ‘Head of’, ‘Senior’, ‘Lead’ are the adjectives, and they inflate for free; what a person actually decided, owned and shipped are the verbs, and those are far harder to fake. Read a CV the way an editor reads a draft, cutting the modifiers to see which verbs survive. That’s the direction comp design is already heading, Mercer reports a shift toward skills-based, transparent pay frameworks, pricing the work rather than the word. Treat the title as noise to be verified, and the distortion stops setting your decisions for you. The market may keep inflating the words; you don’t have to keep pricing off them.

Once the verbs are what you’re reading for, the interview has to do the work the label used to do. The questions that get there are boringly specific. What did you decide without asking anyone? What’s the last thing you killed, and who tried to stop you? What was the biggest budget you personally signed? Whose job did your call put at risk? Scope lives in the answers to questions like these, and a genuine mandate produces them in minutes, with names and numbers attached. An inflated one starts reaching for context, describing the function around the person while the actual calls stay vague.

The tell is usually the pronoun. Genuine owners say ‘I decided,’ then name the tradeoff they got wrong, because owning a decision means owning the misses too. Borrowed scope slides into ‘we’ and ‘the team’ and ‘the leadership group,’ the collective grammar that dilutes a call until it belongs to no one in particular. So ask again. A second, quieter ‘and what did you personally own there?’ tells you more about the real span of a role than any line on the CV, and it costs you 30 seconds. Do it consistently and you stop being the employer at the end of the chain who inherits someone else’s inflated word.

The habit that holds all of this together is a short document written before the role opens. Set down the mandate as a spec: the decisions this person owns outright, the budget they sign, the span they carry, the 3 outcomes they’ll be measured on in year one, and the 2 things that are explicitly someone else’s. That page is what you hire against and what you pay against. The title comes last, once the scope is fixed, so it can only describe the job. It has no room left to define it. A spec also survives handoff: the next interviewer, the comp committee, the parent company all read the same defined scope, so the label has less room to drift on your watch.

Do this and the benchmark starts to repair from the inside. The comparison becomes one mandate against another, which is the only comparison that was ever real, and the market-average ‘Head of’ stops being the yardstick you reach for. It’s the same instinct behind the move to performance-linked senior pay, applied before the hire, while you can still shape the role. After the hire, all you can do is reconcile. The word on the card will keep drifting. Write the mandate first, and the title becomes what it should have been all along: a label on a job you’ve already defined.