Ask-A-Recruiter: My Job Title Doesn’t Accurately Reflect my Responsibilities
Contributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
This question came up at a recent coaching session with a new client: My last job has a title that sounds much more administrative than the actual job. How do I accurately list the title on my resume without pigeonholing myself into administrative jobs with a similar title?
There are few jobseekers who can get a job on the strength of their resume alone. Someone who is working at a brand name company and wants to transition to a competitor in the same function is an example of a jobseeker that can probably get hits from her resume alone.
However, if you have any gaps in your resume, if you are moving industries, if you are changing functions, if you have been out of the workforce for any amount of time, or if anything about your background requires clarification, you cannot rely on your resume speaking for itself. You need to focus your energy on getting face time with the decision maker so that you are doing the selling (not your resume).
That being said, you can use the descriptive bullets under your job title to make your responsibilities and duties clearer, and play up the non-administrative aspects of your job, particularly the areas in which you were tasked with responsibility for the bottom line or played a leadership role on a project. Highlight managerial skills and aspects of your work that may not be apparent from your job title alone.
Similarly in the case of the jobseeker who has a title that doesn’t reflect what she did, she has to have the chance to explain what she did in more detail. She has to use the correct title because this is something that may be checked during the reference stage. But she is not relegated to just what that title implies. Through targeted networking and conducting smart informational interviews, she can tell people directly and compellingly what she accomplished in the role. If she does this successfully, a resume review will be an afterthought and the title used will not carry as much weight.
She needs to be prepared to answer why the job carries that title and why she accepted the job that way. A thorough recruiter will challenge a candidate if the job title implies something very different to what the candidate says she did. But if the candidate can demonstrate that she indeed played the broader/ more senior/ more bottom-line oriented role than the title implies, then she can get the credit for what she did regardless of title. But she has to get the opportunity to tell her story and not rely on her resume for his. Yet another reason why the best jobseekers are proactive and do not cede control of their search to passive resume drops or responding to ads.
Learn how to position yourself for maximum impact and other job search secrets from personalized, 1:1 coaching with SixFigureStart, 212-501-2234 or www.sixfigurestart.com.
