Company changed everyone's titles to weird obscure names

Question

I'm a QCV Editor. That doesn't stand for anything, it's just my initials. It's my new title at my company, sent out this week in an email about addressing the high turnover problem. Every software engineer here now has a unique acronym and term like "editor", "maintainer", "janitor", "operator", where before we were "back-end engineer" or "web developer". The company also says that they won't be able to verify employment in references if we list ourselves as our old title and someone calls mentioning that.

How should I go about trying to get a new job now? Should I keep my old "full-stack engineer" title and just say they can't call for a reference?

Answer 1

Put both on your resume so that the reader will have a good idea on what you’re doing AND that your company has an alternative title system. The reader can just then read the description to determine the details of your job

e.g.

Super Hip Company - Backend Engineer (Internal Title Code: Hadouken)

Tuned and optimized SQL Queries to scale product up from a million queries a day to a billion per hour, etc.

Answer 2

The company also says that they won't be able to verify employment in references if we list ourselves as our old title and someone calls mentioning that.

That seems extremely unlikely.

Perhaps a foolish HR Rep might say something like "no, that's not the current title" and tell the potential employer the made-up nonsense title. But I seriously doubt they would say that you didn't actually work there. That would be a lie, and in general HR reps won't lie.

If I were checking references, and the reference I contacted told me a nonsense title, I'd ask them the duties of the job. In your case, I'd quickly understand that you were a full-stack engineer. And of course I'd also quickly understand how ridiculous the new title was.

How should I go about trying to get a new job now? Should I keep my old "full-stack engineer" title and just say they can't call for a reference?

In your resume, you should keep the old "Full-stack Engineer".

If the new title ever comes up, you can explain the company's odd change as you have here. My guess is that the hiring manager would just laugh and shake their head.

Hopefully, you find a new job soon and leave this company's wacky practice behind.

Answer 3

I started out thinking that this was the relevant Dilbert cartoon, but it is more insidious.

The company also says that they won't be able to verify employment in references if we list ourselves as our old title and someone calls mentioning that.

Their solution to turnover is to try and render you unemployable elsewhere

Keep the old title on your resume and just tell this detail to the hiring manager whenever you get an interview for a new job (which hopefully would be soon). Tell them proactively, as I disagree with part of Joe's answer.

A HR rep at a major company would be unlikely to lie, but you clearly do not work for AT&T or Ford. This is evidently a company where the absurd is allowed and if the HR person is also the company founder or another early position in a startup, then screwing with someone they might view as a traitor is hardly unheard of.

Answer 4

This must be a joke, if it is, it's pretty funny.

Just wait a couple of days

If it's really a joke, everyone will know in a couple of workdays. If after a couple of workdays, you still think your boss was serious, then do the following.

Document everything

Email your HR (or the second in command) to ask if your boss was serious or not. Keep all the emails. Keep the original email from your boss especially (but if he didn't put anything in writing, summarize his policy in your email). Print them out (with their full headers). And keep copies at home.

If you're not 100% sure that it was a joke, keep everything just in case.

Find other references

Make a pact with the other employees to provide references to them should they leave before you do, or that they provide references to you should you leave before they do.

Verify the reference from your employer

The first time someone leaves after this policy. Talk to that person and get everybody to chip in for a third party reference check. There are numerous companies that do that. If the reference check goes bad, that third party company will be able to document it.

And if this really does happen, encourage the person that just left to seek help from a lawyer. Hopefully, that person will be able to find a lawyer willing to work on contingency.

Answer 5

Just a thought, this may not apply in your case, but:

In the UK, employment law says you can't make a role redundant and employ someone else in that role for at least 6 months - one way around this that a savvy company may try (and I've worked for such a company previously) is to give each employee a different title - giving the ability to make any one of them redundant, whilst being able to hire a new replacement almost immediately.

Answer 6

To add to the excellent answer about documentation: keep some old pay stubs. If company says you didn’t work there, you can show that they are lying. (And maybe you even have the old job title on it.). Also, if you still have it, the transfer/promotion/job offer that has the old title.

Answer 7

Optimise your resume for the reader.

Only put exactly the information they need in there. This obscure job title from your current employer is just noise. It benefits nobody to include it - it only risks misunderstanding.

Make things as easy as possible for the hiring manager who will read your resume. They'll have many to read with limited time. Use the industry standard title, or the title they're hiring for if it's a similar role.

And don't worry about the reference thing. To the extent it's an issue, you can inform them about it and deal with it later when they're already invested in hiring you. At that point, any minor/silly inconveniences in obtaining a reference will be worked around.

What you should be optimising for now is getting your resume noticed, and securing an interview.

Answer 8

I think it's fairly important to frame answers to this question in the context of typical advice - because this is a rare situation where typical advice may not make sense (which makes this question not a duplicate of the many well answered questions about how to list job titles on resumes.)

Resumes are sales tools. You are selling yourself to potential employers. So, you should try to follow typical best practices for other sales tools: You want your resume to be interesting, relevant, and truthful.

When it comes to listing job titles, people sometimes have the desire to lean heavily on the interesting and relevant criteria, and come up with great-sounding or "more standard" titles than they actually have. This is often advised against, because it can be a slippery slope. Providing titles that have any chance of being interpreted as misleading (when compared to your real title) can leave you looking like you're trying too hard, or that you're downright deceptive. Those are not the traits you want your potential new employer to identify you with. Hence, typical advice is to be 100% literal and truthful with your job title on your resume, and then use the description you provide to actually lay out what you really did. This is a best of both worlds approach because it allows you to remain honest, yet still provide relevant detail.

However, in the case of a (deliberately?) obscure and unintelligible title, it's arguably not the best idea to follow this typical advice. If I was hiring for a back end developer and I was scanning through my employer's HR recruiting tool (which pulls job titles from your resume and lists them next to candidate's names in a list) and I saw QCV Editor, I would be confused, at best - or turned off from looking at you, at worst.

So, in this case, as suggested by other answers, it probably makes sense to list something else - perhaps with an explanation of the internal title. Such as,

Back End Developer (QCV Editor)

This will help avoid confusion while still allowing you to (more or less) remain faithful to typical advice about not "faking" job titles.

Answer 9

On my resume I just put the title at my company and write out the description. I find it difficult to believe that a company's verification can't say you worked there because your title mismatched. Usually a company calls a past employer and simply ask if X worked there for Y under the title Z. It sounds like they want you to think twice about leaving especially if you're in a high position so you can't move to a job with a higher pay.

My previous company went the route of obscuring everyone's title to something very difficult to understand. The reason is simple: they don't want to give pay raises to people. The problem at my last company a lot of folks complained why someone in the same title is making more when they both worked the same amount of time. The company couldn't really answer so the solution they came up with is that everyone's title is different. So if you both share the same job, they can argue that your titles are different and that tile pays more.

It seems like your company took an extra step and made it to where they don't want you to find a new job. Perhaps your company suffers a high turn over? And maybe they want people to think twice, especially folks who stayed around for years and can't adequately explain their job title elsewhere. For example, if year 1-4 you were a entry developer, then years 5-6 you were manager, but then years 7-10, you were "Superman XWing Fighter Superduper" then you really can't explain the title and they can't say well for the previous years, you were manager. So your next job you can't say you were a manager for 5 years thus losing your credibility.