The Job Title May Be Losing Its Power in Hiring

I think I accidentally started a series.

I didn’t plan it that way.

And then LinkedIn made a post yesterday that caught my attention:

Hiring Assistant 2: Recruiters Gain New AI Tools to Find and Engage Talent

The timing was almost too perfect.

Several things I’ve written recently keep circling the same question:

How is AI changing the way we find, develop and evaluate talent?

🪜 If AI Removes the First Rung, Somebody Has to Build a New Ladder.

🧠 The Next AI Talent War May Be for Experts, Not Engineers.

🎯 The Application Funnel May Be Breaking.

I published that last one yesterday.

While working through it, I kept coming back to another question:

What if we’ve been searching for talent in the wrong order?

Traditional recruiting often starts with:

• 💼 Job title
• 🏢 Company
• 🏭 Industry
• 🎓 Education
• 📄 Keywords

Then we determine whether the people we find have the capabilities we need.

What if we reversed that?

Start with the work.

Identify the capabilities required.

Look for evidence of those capabilities and adjacent or transferable skills.

Then use titles, companies, industries and education as context.

Capability first. Proxies second.

That’s why LinkedIn’s announcement caught my attention.

LinkedIn says leading AI-frontier talent organizations are increasingly making hiring decisions around:

Skills and capabilities rather than job titles.

I’m not the only one thinking about this.

💭 Brett’s Perspective

Job titles, companies, industries, degrees and career histories aren’t useless.

They’re signals.

But they’re not what we’re actually trying to find.

We’re trying to find capability.

Historically, determining what someone could actually do at scale was difficult.

So recruiting built shortcuts:

Title → Company → Industry → Keywords → Candidate

AI may give us an opportunity to change the order:

Work → Capabilities → Evidence → Adjacent Skills → Candidate

Then everything else becomes supporting context rather than an automatic gate.

Someone with the “wrong” title might have exactly the right capability.

Someone from the “wrong” industry may have highly transferable experience.

Someone without the traditional pedigree may have stronger evidence of doing the work.

And someone with the perfect résumé may not.

That doesn’t mean turning hiring decisions over to an algorithm.

Quite the opposite.

The more sophisticated these systems become, the more important evidence, explainability and human judgment become.

Technology should help us understand capability better.

People should still make the consequential decisions.

Maybe skills-based hiring isn’t about adding more skills to a search query.

Maybe it’s about changing what we search for first.

Capability first. Proxies second. Human judgment at the end.

That feels like a much more interesting future for Talent Intelligence.