<aside> ⚠️ this is deprecated in favor of [Job Titles at Levels - June 2022](https://levelshealth.notion.site/Job-Titles-at-Levels-June-2022-b8e1bc086c6b4f1c810750f3dcd5298a)
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The purpose of this document is to explore a few principles that determine job titles.
We're fortunate in that we have a low ego team that doesn't attach much weight to titles, but it's worth giving some thought to what titles mean, how they're determined, and what they're used for.
Defining area of responsibility for an individual is a little bit tricky at our stage since everyone is a generalist, so the title is often poor reflection of everything they're responsible for — and in many cases, the vast majority of their time will be spent on something unrelated to their title — but there are a few things that having an effective system for titles helps with. We'll explore a them below.
This is not an attempt to explain the difference between a "Head of X" and a "Head of Y" or what the difference is between a VP, a Director, or anything like that. We'll have to put more thought into that as we get bigger, but it's not a problem we need to solve right now.
One principle is that titles are used to attract the right people to a given role. If you're looking for an engineer, you should post that you're looking for an "engineer". If you're looking for an engineer and you post that you're looking for an "operations specialist", even if you have all the responsibilities listed that apply to an engineer, you're going to get a lot of the wrong people applying — and likely a lot of confused applicants.
An interesting case study has been our search for what was originally called "Head of Clinical Research" (job description here: levels.link/clinical). What we discovered is that the only people that were applying to the role titled "Clinical Research" were doctors, who thought it was a clinical role.
After talking to a number of candidates, we learned about a common role in healthcare called "clinical development", which is the role that thinks through company objectives and creates clinical trials to demonstrate outcomes for use in marketing. This was closer, so we decided to rename it "Head of Clinical Development", which seemed closer to what we were looking for. But then most of the candidates were people with a marketing background, which wasn't right either...
We then changed it to "Head of Research", but then the candidates we started seeing were mostly academics and researchers, which also wasn't what we were looking for.
After several dozen interviews, we realized that the thing we really wanted was someone who is a generalist with primarily product experience (ideally a Founder) that has exposure to healthcare regulation and clinical research, and who has a willingness to learn more about clinical research. We concluded that product and business intuition are harder to teach than the research side of the role.
After almost 5 months of interviews, we settled on the title "Head of Clinical Product", which is finally yielding the types of candidates we're looking for. Interestingly, none of the responsibilities listed in the job description changed during that 5 months, but the name of the position was important to attracting the right kinds of people to the role — which are product-focused people with experience interfacing with regulatory and clinical research.
In other words, it went from:
Head of Clinical Research ⇒
Head of Clinical Development ⇒
Head of Research ⇒
Head of Clinical Product
All the while, the actual responsibilities of the role didn't change more than a couple sentences.
<aside> 💡 Takeaway: A good title is one that attracts the right candidates to a given role.
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Another reason titles exist is for signaling. Titles are often used to signal one's status within a company and to one's peers.
Signaling is responsible for most of the toxic aspects of titles — many people can relate to arguing over who gets what title, and nit picking about who reports to who based on who has what title — but there are aspects of title signaling that are important to recognize and embrace.
It's important to keep in mind that titles at Levels are intended to reduce friction and increase clarity. When interfacing with external parties that expect to interface with someone with a given title, it might be necessary to have externally-facing titles that reduce friction.