Today’s Pill (2): The Inflated Titles Vs. No Skills

The first employees, at a tech startup, have many responsibilities and a strategic impact. Therefore, they tend to move up quickly. Some recruiters say there’s title inflation (and LinkedIn is proof.) As long as these professionals tell a story in their resume and when 1:1, I notice an upward trajectory, and while on the job the startup doubles its top line like every quarter, I have nothing against hiring someone having a previous tile of CMO and now applying for a design associate role, or a CTO still looking to deal with lines of code and applying for a developer managerial position. As long as the (ex-)CTO, for example, is charismatic, passionate and enthusiastic, and I/we understand that s/he managed an agile team of only a few, but previously backend architected a product for thousands of users, and wrote lots of code in the beginning and, as the team s/he hired grew, only parts of the MVP, definitely we’d like to speak with her/him. Personality, passion and skills; these are the attributes that matter when building a leadership team, while the craftsmanship in writing and touching on the buzz words in a resume is less relevant. Feel free to disagree on this.

The real issue is hiring individuals with no skills. Lucky us, in the tech startup world this is highly unlikely. On the flip side, just open your TV on a news channel and listen for a few minutes, and you’ll see plenty of non-communication/-conversation abilities or situations where the lack of professional skills (backed by lack of relevant education or fake diplomas) is cause to the failures, with politicians leading the pack.

As far as concerns LinkedIn, their Pro-ML layers, powering hundreds of ML models across different products, will hopefully address within the short- to medium-run some of the fakes that have invaded the society.