Vibe Managers, Gurus, and Rockstars: Decoding the Strategic Use of Unconventional Job Titles in Organizations

Job titles communicate occupational role and status in a form readily understood within and across organizations. However, popularization of a new class of job titles challenges the extant theoretical understanding of job titles as standardized categorization tools. Titles such as “chief storyteller” or “happiness hero” raise questions about why organizations would assign such titles. In this paper, I take a strategic human resource management perspective and develop theory to explain how organizations use unconventional job titles to signal: (a) the re-bundling of new tasks into novel roles, and (b) the rebranding of a role to reflect the organization’s symbolic attributes. Drawing on these two signals, I differentiate four types of titles: “conventional,” “elastic,” “semantic,” and “transfigured.” I then link these job title types to both intended and unintended outcomes in the hiring process. I identify two downstream signal cost mechanisms—(1) legibility costs at attraction and (2) verification costs at selection—that reveal the costs organizations bear when they deploy signals outside established institutional infrastructure. As a whole, I seek to revitalize dormant theory on job titles and offer a timely lens into how titles function as some of the first signals of a broader human resource management system in a dynamic labor market environment.