Jobs, people and boxes: taking the humanity out of human resources

One of the more eye catching pieces I’ve read this week was about the seemingly trivial subject of job titles, particularly those used in job adverts when companies want to stand out from the crowd in some way. To make anodyne positions sound more interesting there is an increasing trend to jazz them up in some way, by overcomplicating, adding unnecessary suffixes or introducing technical jargon. ‘Cleaner’ is a pretty succinct description of what the job entails and rebranding it as a ‘hygiene operative’ or similar arrant nonsense is neither…