There’s a particular kind of stuck that happens when leaders need help making workforce decisions, but the foundation of the job architecture is not really in place yet.

Leaders want help with promotion decisions, offers, pay positioning, benchmarking, and headcount planning. But there is no clear leveling structure to work from. Titles are inflated and inconsistent. Level definitions are either missing, outdated, or used differently across teams (for the same role!).

Before People teams can give useful guidance on these decisions, the leveling framework needs to be built or refined. Otherwise, every decision becomes harder than it needs to be.

You end up with a Director title who has no direct reports and is responsible for work closer to an IC4 scope. You have managers advising executives every day and meeting the strategic needs of a VP level role, but their title and level never caught up. Some employees were given titles in lieu of salary during a cash-tight stretch. Others were forgotten altogether in the frenzy of fast-moving business needs and org changes.

Usually, title inflation is the result of short-term decisions that made sense at the time. But, no worries, we got you on a path forward.

Title inflation is comp debt

Every inflated title was probably a reasonable call at the moment. For closing that super star candidate, retaining a flight risk, or rewarding someone with long tenure when there was no budget for a raise. Maybe you gave a title bump because it felt easier than dealing with the bigger compensation issue underneath it.

But like all comp debt, these decisions compound. Employees doing similar work with different titles eventually notice the gap. Managers start making exceptions because the structure is already wonky anyway. Leaders ask for guidance, but the data shows inconsistency. People teams end up trying to explain decisions that were never clearly defined in the first place (draining!).

Meanwhile, trust gets harder to maintain, and the next exception becomes easier to justify. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some leaders look at the symptoms of unclear levels and inconsistent titles and decide it is not worth the disruption or the manager's time. Or, they do not trust managers to level accurately anyway, so they avoid the cleanup altogether. But what is worse is the status quo.

So many important workforce decisions depend on this structure: offers, pay benchmarking, promotion calibration, headcount planning, and pay transparency. It is often the difference between defensible pay decisions and decisions that feel subjective, inconsistent, or hard to explain. And as pay transparency requirements expand, including with the EU Pay Transparency Directive, messy titles and levels can create more than just internal confusion - They create compliance and communication risk.

How to fix title, level, and ultimately pay

A title is what the outside world sees. A level is your internal calibration. It tells you what the role is benchmarked against, what the growth path looks like, and how the role fits into the broader job architecture.

Ideally, titles align with job families, career paths, and business needs. They should be used consistently when offers are made, promotions are processed, and roles are reviewed. But that does not mean you need to change everyone’s title all at once. In fact, doing that can create more angst than progress.

A phased approach usually works better. You can keep employees’ existing titles for now while cleaning up the internal structure behind the scenes. For example, an employee’s company title may stay as-is, while a more system-based business title maps to the correct job family, level, and market benchmark. That way, People teams and managers have a cleaner structure to work from, even if the employee-facing title does not change immediately.

Then, over time, you can update titles when the timing makes sense - upon a promotion, reorg, a role change, or manager transition. Or, in some cases, when the title change is simply good news because it is more accurate and better reflects the work they are already doing. Title inflation cleanup doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can align the timeline to your culture, business goals, and other People initiatives already in motion.

A few tips to keep in mind

Level: correct it internally, quietly

Levels exist for calibration. They help with benchmarking, pay ranges, promotion readiness, and workforce planning. They do not need to be announced on the intranet or rolled out in an all hands company-wide meeting.

For much of the misaligned population, the first fix can happen in the system. Their current title can stay in the company title field, while the business title or job architecture field reflects the accurate level. For example, someone’s current title might be “Software Engineer Hero,” but the internal business title maps to “Senior Software Engineer.” That allows future compensation decisions to reference the right benchmark, promotion discussions to happen against the right expectations, and managers to work from a consistent structure.

TL;DR - The employee’s visible title does not always need to change immediately.

Title: fix it at natural transition points

External-facing titles can often stay for a period of time, especially in sales or customer-facing roles where the title serves a practical purpose. But internally, titles still need to be cleanly mapped to the company’s job architecture, career paths, and business needs.

The best time to fix titles is usually when the organization gives you a natural opening like a reorg or promotion. These moments make the change feel less like a correction and more like part of a larger business update. This also helps avoid the emotional reaction that can come when someone feels like their title is being taken away, even when the intent is simply to create consistency.

Pay: nobody takes a cut

Never reduce someone’s pay because of a leveling correction. That is the kind of decision that usually breaks trust and makes the employee leave. 

If someone ends up above their pay band after the level is corrected, then it is what it is. You manage it over time - that may mean freezing base salary until the employee grows into the next level or until the range catches up. If they are a strong performer, you can still recognize them in other ways, such as a spot bonus in lieu of a base salary increase.

The point is not to punish employees for historical decisions the company made. It’s to clean up the structure so future decisions are more consistent and defensible.

Going forward

Once the structure is cleaned up, every new hire and promotion should follow the same title and leveling framework. Titles, levels, job families, and career paths should be clearly defined with leaders and consistently used across the organization. This avoids all those exceptions creeping in.

Welcome to the phase where new offers are cleaner and promotion decisions become easier to calibrate! Pay benchmarking becomes more accurate too. The bonus is that People teams can give guidance without having to explain around a messy foundation and managers have clarity on structure they can actually use.

Title inflation does not need to be fixed all at once, but it does need to be fixed intentionally. Because clean titles and levels are the foundation for better pay decisions.