Your Title Is a Cage and HR Built It

There are few things stronger than the human urge to understand other people by finding their context.

A title.

A role.

A category.

There is, of course, a logical explanation for this. Not that long ago, it was useful to know whether the person in front of you belonged to your group, your village, your side of the road. Whether they were safe or not. The instinct to feel, sort and categorise people makes sense as a survival mechanism. But, it becomes less useful when brought into modern labour market. Especially when it comes to creative work.

Somewhere along the way, we have started to treat titles as if they are the same thing as competence. As if a person’s ability is locked inside the last industry they worked in, the last format they produced, or the last job title printed under their name.

We mistake categories for competence.

This is expressed in numerous of not so intelligent ways. A content creator can make content for retail, but as it would seem not for education, culture, fashion or publishing. Or a strategist can understand one type of business, but is suddenly considered risky in another, as if patterns, people, needs, language and behaviour politely stay inside sector borders.

They do not. A craft is a craft.

A seamstress who has made trousers does not suddenly become useless when asked to make a shirt. Of course, there are specialisations, some work requires deep technical knowledge. But the idea that competence only counts when it has already been applied to the exact same thing before is stupid. Applied anywhere else, the logic becomes ridiculous quite quickly. Imagine hiring a carpenter.

“Have you built shelves before?”

“Yes.”

“Have you built shelves in homes?”

“Yes.”

“Have you built shelves in older homes?”

“Yes.”

“Have you built a shelf in a brick house in the countryside?”

“No, not specifically.”

“Right. Unfortunately, we are looking for someone with at least five years of proven shelf-building experience in brick houses in the countryside, preferably in a fast-paced environment. You seem great, but we’ve decided to move forward with candidates whose background is a closer match.”

At some point, I would argue that this titlemania is not even about competence. It is about a complete failure to understand what a craft is. The shelf is still a shelf. The craft is still the craft.

In creative work, this mindset is deeply limiting. Because creativity does not live neatly inside job titles. It moves between formats, industries, references, behaviours and needs. It borrows, translates, connects and reconfigures. It asks what something is, what it could become, who it speaks to and why anyone should care.

This title hassle has been a lifelong struggle for me, professionally. What is my title? What do I call myself on a slide, on LinkedIn, in a pitch?

Creative strategist.

Brand strategist.

Marketing manager.

Different labels, but I am the same person. Different names, same toolbox. And because I work in marketing, an industry with a remarkable talent for rebranding old work as new terminology, the labels keep changing. Content was once the new it girl. Then came customer success. Digital customer journeys. Growth. Community. Experience. I will stop here. We need to save some fun for later.

The point is that the work is often, to put it mildly, the same underneath the vocabulary.

I keep having this conversation with people who work creatively( or honestly work in general). Writers, designers, strategists, art directors, editors, producers, communicators, artists: people who often have a clear craft, a body of knowledge and a way of working, finds that their competence is rebranded depending on who is hiring.

One calls it communication. Another calls it content. A third calls it brand. A fourth has invented a title that sounds like it was made up during a long conference call with 5 too many people.

At this point, I am not confused by this idiocracy. I am bored by it, which is worse.

The ability to create is not tied to one defined context, one previous industry or one approved format. It moves. It adapts. It carries experience from one place into another.

The tools may be used on different material, but the deeper ability is still there: to notice, connect, shape, translate and come up with ideas. Of course context is learned but, learning a context is part of the job.

The sector or title is not it. It's the way a person thinks, see patterns, connect what others keep separate, the way uncertainty is turned into direction.

And there would be more interesting, fun, imaginative and expanding creative work, if we stopped asking people to prove, preferably in three rounds and with supporting documentation, that they have already done the exact same thing before.

Sometimes the point is that they have not.

//Sofia