Hiring for Adjectives
Engineering, at its core, is the application of various domains in the pursuit of solving problems. So recruitment, when it comes to engineering really has one question to answer: can this person solve problems?
It's a hard thing to judge in half an hour, and our answer for the past decade or more has been to prepend an ever-increasing vocabulary of adjectives to people's job titles, in the vain hope the adjectives do the judging for us.
Inevitably what follows is inflation, if everybody else is "Senior", how do you distinguish yourself? Well, that's where we start to introduce "Staff" and "Principal", which of course expands to even more absurdity to include "Senior Principal" or "Senior Staff" and so on. Each new tier we mint like any currency printed in ever greater quantities, buys a little less than the last.
Now of course this isn't to say role titles are entirely devoid of meaning - they can map to pay bands and they give people some sense of whether they're progressing.
As well, candidates have to contest increasingly with ATSs that won't even surface a CV without the right keyword in it. Ultimately, if the filter reads adjectives, candidates will supply adjectives. "Hate the game, not the player" as they say.
The issue from a hiring perspective though, the closer two of these titles sit to each other, the less the gap between them tells you. Put a Senior and a Principal in front of me from two different companies and I couldn't say which one handles more ambiguity, owns more of a system, or is better to have in the room on a hard problem. All I'd know is that two sets of people, applying two standards I've never seen, landed on two different words. The distinction may be real inside the company, but outside of that it often evaporates.
The odd result is that the titles we chase end up mattering more in recruitment than the problems we solve. Which is totally at odds with what the role of being an engineer is about.
None of this is as quick as a keyword search, and I know that's the whole appeal of the keyword search, but titles are only a cheap filter until you count what they filter out, and missing someone because they didn't use the right adjective in their title is an expensive way to save time.