“Some recruitment consultants invent silly job titles!” says other recruitment consultant
What a lot of jobbledygook: Recruitment staff re-title plain jobs to make them impressive
WHAT do you say to a mobile sustenance facilitator? Onions and ketchup, please.
The ludicrous job title is, after all, for someone who works in a burger van.
It’s enough to make you fling your snack to the ground, where it could be cleaned up by the highway environmental hygienists – or road sweepers, in old money.
These are some of the examples of “jobbledygook”, ridiculous job titles dreamt up by talent delivery specialists – sorry, recruitment staff – at councils and businesses to make ordinary jobs sound much more impressive.
Horrendous PR portmanteau aside, how much evidence is there for the headline claim of ‘mobile sustenance facilitator’ as a job title? Not an awful lot – in fact, beyond a Telegraph article from April 2009 (itself a piece of PR by Bad PR regulars OnePoll.com), there’s no mention of the fabled job title in anything other than churns of this latest press release, which also featured in the Daily Mail, 7th November 2013.
Who was it regurgitating a story from four years ago, to make headlines last week?
Recruitment expert Chris Smith said: “In today’s job market a receptionist is a guest services agent, a bin man is a sanitation engineer – the list goes on.
“We hear from candidates all the time about job titles which are wildly over the top.
“One was for a colour distribution technician – it was for a painter and decorator.
A list of overblown and ridiculous job titles has now been compiled by Mr Smith’s recruitment website, myjobmatcher.com, to help jobseekers cut through the jargon.
While you can’t trust those other recruitment consultancies and their fanciful job titles, you can put your trust in the honest-to-goodness transparency of Mr Chris Smith – or so he’d like you to believe, having commandeered a page in multiple national newspapers to convince you of the fact.
“Some of the euphemisms used are downright ridiculous.”
You’re right Chris, they are. And that people would actually believe these terms are genuinely used – rather than an attention-seeking outrage-stoker constructed by a PR executive. Sorry, ‘Media bullshit generation consultant’.