What’s in a name:
do job titles matter?

For our recruitment services, we have come across numerous job descriptions for vacancies. Each vacancy is accompanied with a carefully thought-out job title in the hope to attract the right talent for the job. It is a tricky task – if a job title is too vague or too rigid, it may scare off talents that would otherwise be an outstanding match for your organization. In this post, we’ll discuss some common titles for fundraising professionals and how a job title might affect the chances of you finding your perfect candidate.

Many organizations would like to communicate very plainly and specifically on job responsibilities in the in the job title itself. This can be very helpful for talents as they can know, at a glance, what their future employer wants them to focus on, for example, corporate fundraising, institutional donors, or major gifts. Subsequently, they can foresee their central contributions to the team, e.g. writing funding proposals, maintaining existing relations with donors, or managing a team of fundraisers.

However, when we did a tally in our database, we found that there are a lot of different job titles for quite similar positions in fundraising. For example, a ‘donor engagement manager’, an ‘institutional donor manager’, and an ‘advisor donor partnerships’ might in practice do the same work: building and maintaining relationships with institutional donors and developing and managing appealing proposals. Likewise, a ‘business development officer’, a ‘corporate relationship manager’, and a ‘corporate partnerships lead’ all effectively build and strengthen corporate relations to attract new funding. While it may be true that these different titles have unique functions to the organization, it is more likely that these names were a carry-over from past titles without further consideration for current job market and / or job responsibilities.

To tackle these problems, we advise our clients to actively focus on clarity when they decide on a job title. Unambiguous job titles are important because they define the responsibilities of the position and avoid alienating people that are not (yet) familiar with specific terminology. From the perspective of a recruiter: the combination of a sub-field (e.g., ‘corporate’) and an accurate description of job activities (e.g., ‘partnership developer’) works best.

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