From Title to Skill to Work

The gold watch is a relic. Not just as a reward — as a metaphor for how we thought careers worked.

For most of the twentieth century, a career had a shape: you joined an organization, you moved up through defined levels, and if you stayed long enough, someone handed you a watch and a round of applause. That logic didn't just shape how people worked. It shaped how organizations found them.

We used titles. Because titles, in that world, meant something.

Era One: The Title

When organizations were stable and careers were linear, a title did real work. It told you where someone sat in a hierarchy, what they'd done, and roughly what they were ready to do next. A “Senior Manager” at one company translated reasonably to a “Senior Manager” at another. The signal was legible because the system behind it was consistent.

So talent discovery became title-matching. You needed a Head of Finance, you found people with “Head of Finance” in their history, you interviewed a few, you hired one. It was blunt, but it worked — as long as the underlying architecture held.

It didn't hold.

When “Director” can mean forty different things across forty different companies, it stops being a signal. It becomes noise. The architecture that made title-matching work had collapsed — and nobody built a replacement fast enough.

Era Two: The Skill

The diagnosis that emerged around 2022 was correct: if titles can't be trusted, look at what people can actually do. Skills-based hiring — prioritizing verifiable capability over credentials and job history — arrived as the obvious fix.

The logic was sound. The intentions were good. And then something strange happened: hiring didn't get better.

First: most skills-based hiring was skills-based in name only. The Burning Glass Institute, in partnership with Harvard Business School, found that despite 85% of companies claiming to practice skills-based hiring, only 0.14% of actual hires were affected by changes in hiring behavior. The vast majority of commitments lived in policy documents. The process — screen by degree, filter by title, move to interview — stayed exactly the same.

Second: skills inflated, too. The same forces that made titles meaningless went to work on skills. Certifications multiplied. AI-optimized CVs made it easy to list skills without having them. Everyone who applied for a data role had “Python” on their profile. Everyone who applied for a marketing role had “content strategy.”

The Brookings Institution put it plainly: hiring managers inflated degree requirements in the first place because they were an efficient, if blunt, instrument to narrow an applicant pool. To move away from degrees, you need an equally efficient substitute. Skills assessments were supposed to be that substitute. In practice, skills became the new credentials: proxies with a short half-life, subject to the same inflation, and still not answering the question that actually matters.

Era Three: The Work

Here is the thing about skills that the skills-based hiring movement has never quite resolved: they are shared.

Python is shared. Strategic thinking is shared. Communication is shared. Thousands of people applying for the same role will have the same skills listed. The skill is necessary but not sufficient. It tells you the person can do the work. It tells you nothing about whether this is the work that energizes them — and whether the way they do it is what your situation actually needs.

Two people can have identical skills and produce completely different results. Not because one is more capable than the other. But because one of them is doing work that fits how they think, how they make decisions, what problems fascinate them, how they handle ambiguity, how they collaborate when no one is watching. The other is doing work that doesn't. Skills got them both in the room. Work fit determines what happens after they arrive.

A skill is what you can do; a competency describes how you do it — combining behavior, knowledge, and application. Writing SQL is a skill. Solving a business problem with data is a competency. But even competency, as it's usually measured, still sits too far from the actual texture of daily work.

Why This Matters More Now Than Ever

We are hiring in a market where the traditional signals have all broken down at once. Titles are inflated. Skills are inflated. AI makes it easy to optimize a CV for any filter a recruiter sets. The median time from first application to first offer in 2025 was 68.5 days — and many job seekers need to send 100 to 200 applications before landing one. Companies are drowning in applicants who look right on paper and disappear within a year.

The companies that are hiring well are not the ones who found a better filter. They are the ones who changed the question. Instead of asking “does this person match the job?” they are asking “does this work match this person?” — and they are reaching that question earlier in the process, before the job posting, before the application, often before they even know exactly what they need.

The entire history of talent discovery — from title-matching to skills-matching — has been an attempt to scale that original insight. We have built better and better filters. What we have not built, until recently, is a way to capture work identity: what a person genuinely wants to do next, how they do it best, and which environments and problems bring out their best work. That is the signal that has been missing. And it turns out it was missing from both sides of the table.

What Work-Based Matching Looks Like

It starts with a different kind of profile. Not a CV, which is a backward-looking document organized around titles and institutions. Not a skills list, which is a snapshot of what you can do abstracted from any context. A work profile starts with what you want to do next — the kinds of problems you want to solve, the tasks that put you in flow, the environments where you've done your best work. It is forward-facing, not backward-looking.

On the company side, it starts with a different kind of brief. Not a job description, which is usually a wish list of credentials and past titles dressed up as a requirements document. A work brief asks: what does this person actually need to do on a typical day? What does success look like after three months? What kind of thinking does this work require? What kind of person thrives in this environment?

When those two things meet — a work identity and a work brief — the match is real. Not a keyword match. Not a credential match. A match between what someone genuinely brings and what actually needs doing.

This is where hiring is going. The gold watch career is long gone. The title-matching it required is gone with it. Skills-based hiring was the right direction, imperfectly executed, and now running into the same inflation problem it was supposed to solve.

What comes next is work-based matching: connecting what people are genuinely built to do with the work that actually needs doing.

The oldest model — someone who knew a person telling someone who needed that person — was already doing this. It just didn't scale. Now it can.