RoastMyResume

Interactive · Free · Obviously roasted

Watch 60 years of
job title inflation

Drag the slider. Watch the same job get three extra adjectives.

20 career paths · 5 eras · 100% real title inflation

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1975·Office & Admin

Secretary

“Typed the boss's letters. Brewed the boss's coffee. Remembered the boss's anniversary.”

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1975

What their résumé looked like

Typewritten. Smells like cigarettes.

JANE A. DOE
Secretary
42 Maple Street · Middleton, OH
(614) 555-0142 · home phone
Objective
To obtain a position of responsibility at a reputable firm where my skills and dedication can be of service.
Experience
Secretary, Acme Co. 1968–1975 Assisted management in all duties as required. Responsible for typed correspondence, filing, and the front office.
Education
B.A., State University, 1968. Typing: 85 wpm.
Hobbies
Tennis. Bridge. Church choir.
References available upon request.

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Methodology: Hand-curated by the same AI that roasts your resume. Career paths picked for cross-generational recognizability.

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Title inflation is real, and it has consequences

The slider is a toy. The underlying trend isn’t: job titles have drifted upward for decades while the work underneath stayed roughly the same, and that drift creates real problems on a resume.

Why titles inflated

Titles are the cheapest thing an employer can give. A raise costs money every year; “Senior” costs nothing and is genuinely motivating. Flat organisations added seniority tiers to create progression without headcount changes, and startups handed out director titles to compete with salaries they couldn’t match. Multiply across decades and “Secretary” becomes “Executive Business Partner.”

What it means for your resume

Titles no longer travel reliably between companies — a Senior Manager at a fifty-person startup and one at a bank are doing different jobs. So a recruiter reads your title as a rough hint and then looks for scope: team size, budget, systems owned, decisions made. If your resume leans on the title to convey seniority, it’s leaning on the least reliable signal on the page.

The practical fix

Keep your real title — inventing one is easily caught in reference checks — and put the scope in the bullets underneath. “Manager” plus “ran a 9-person team across two sites and a $2M budget” outranks any inflated title on its own. If your titles genuinely undersell you, that’s a known pattern: title puffery is one of the five things our Buzzword Density Score counts.