Job Titles and Mobility of Knowledge Workers

How do job titles affect an employee’s propensity for outward mobility? In high-tech contexts, firms are constantly at risk of losing their high quality human capital, such as inventors, due to an increasingly significant threat of employee poaching. Recruiters seek for credible quality signals to assess candidates, and job titles are the first piece of information available. In this paper, we study the role of job title ambiguity for knowledge workers’ mobility. Specifically, we whether ambiguous job titles may create a barrier to outward mobility for knowledge workers in markets with high risk of poaching. Ambiguous job titles may confuse prospective recruiters when they scan poaching targets; they exert more cognitive effort to make sense of the value of those candidates and, thus, are less likely to contact them for mobility opportunities. We utilize the resumes and patent data of 12,719 corporate inventors employed at 172 US corporations in the Information and Communication Technology industry between 2000 and 2014 to test our hypothesis. Our results indicate that individuals holding job titles associated with a high ambiguity are less likely to leave the firm. The result is robust to different measurement techniques of titles’ ambiguity. Our study highlights how job titles as a form of symbolic cues can constitute a meaningful barrier to poaching that complements existing human capital retaining tactics.