Your Job Title Isn't Telling Candidates What the Job Actually Is

The same title, three different jobs

Post a 'controls engineer' role at a semiconductor fab, a water treatment plant, and a food manufacturing line, and you'll get three fundamentally different jobs under the same two words. One is deep in a single high-end PLC/SCADA platform integrated with an MES. Another is largely instrumentation and loop tuning. The third involves as much regulatory documentation as it does programming. Candidates scanning titles have no way to tell which one they're looking at, and many self-select out based on assumptions that turn out to be wrong.

The same pattern shows up with 'project engineer,' which can mean anything from a junior coordination role shepherding paperwork to a senior technical lead making design decisions, and 'field engineer,' which spans everything from a rotational commissioning specialist to a largely desk-based liaison role that occasionally visits site.

Why this matters more now than it used to

• Candidates increasingly research a role heavily before applying, so a vague title filters people out before they ever open the job description
• The tight labor markets described elsewhere in this reporting mean fewer qualified people are casually browsing broad title searches - they're targeting specific scope
• Recruiters and internal talent teams waste real time screening candidates who assumed a scope the job doesn't actually have, and vice versa
• Compensation benchmarking gets distorted when wildly different scopes are compared under the same title across companies

What to do about it in a job posting

The fix isn't inventing new titles - candidates still search on standard terms, so abandoning 'controls engineer' for something creative usually just hurts discoverability. The fix is loading the first two sentences of the posting with the specifics a title can't carry: the platform, the phase of work, the travel expectation, and the level of autonomy.

A practical checklist for scoping a posting

1. Name the specific platform, system, or equipment the role touches, not just the discipline
2. State the project phase - design, startup/commissioning, or steady-state operations - since the actual day-to-day differs enormously by phase
3. Be explicit about travel and rotation expectations in the first few lines, not buried near the bottom
4. Describe the level of autonomy expected (executing a defined scope versus making independent design or sequencing decisions)

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