The title inflation nobody wants to name
‘Head of’ means less every year, and it’s distorting how leaders are hired and paid. What we see when the label and the mandate stop matching.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
What the field notes show
- ‘Head of’ is losing meaning year over year — titles have inflated faster than the mandates behind them.
- The drift distorts both hiring and pay: you benchmark a title that no longer maps to a consistent scope.
- The fix isn’t to police titles — it’s to hire and pay the mandate, and treat the label as noise until proven otherwise.
The label and the mandate have quietly decoupled.
Across ER&D and IT centres, a ‘Head of’ today can mean a leader owning a hundred-person function with real P&L influence — or an individual contributor with an impressive card and a team of three. ‘Director’ spans a similar chasm. The title still carries weight in the room and on LinkedIn, but as a description of actual scope it’s become nearly uninformative. Title inflation has run ahead of the mandates the titles were meant to signal.
Nobody wants to name it because everyone benefits locally. Candidates want the elevated title; centres hand them out to close offers without moving comp; parents tolerate it because it’s cheaper than a raise. Each individual decision is rational. The aggregate is a market where the words on a business card have quietly stopped meaning a consistent thing — and we all keep using them as though they do.
“‘Head of’ used to tell you something. Now it tells you someone negotiated well. When the title and the mandate stop matching, everyone downstream — the next employer, the comp benchmark — inherits the confusion.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
The distortion lands on hiring and pay.
The damage is concrete. When you hire a ‘Head of’ and benchmark them against ‘Head of’ comp, you’re comparing against a title that now covers wildly different realities — so you either overpay for an inflated label or lowball a genuine one, and you often can’t tell which until they’re six months in. The same inflation makes candidates hard to read: a strong operator with a modest title looks junior, and an inflated title masks a thin mandate. The signal you relied on has degraded.
The field notes suggest the fix isn’t to fight the tide or lecture the market about title discipline. It’s to stop trusting the label as data. Hire the mandate — interrogate the actual scope, the real span, the decisions genuinely owned — and pay against that, not against the word. Treat the title as noise to be verified, and the distortion stops setting your decisions for you. The market may keep inflating the words; you don’t have to keep pricing off them.
One pattern worth knowing, every week.
The Signal is our weekly read on the senior GCC talent market — one chart, one pattern, no noise. Written from live placement data.
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