Your Next Senior Hire's Title Doesn't Mean What Your Last One's Did: NBER's 150-Million-Resume Study Builds the Benchmark That Normalizes for Firm Size

Only 19% of people with 20 years of career history have ever held a job that takes the median person 20 years to reach (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025). Not 19% of the underperformers — 19% of everyone who has been working that long. The number comes from a measure six economists built across more than 150 million resumes for one reason: to produce a reading of career attainment that job title inflation cannot move.

That is the part worth your attention. You already suspect that the "Director" on the résumé in front of you and the "Director" you promoted last year are different animals. This paper makes the gap measurable, and it puts the variable you have been ignoring — the size of the employer that granted the title — inside the denominator.

What a 150-Million-Resume Benchmark Actually Measures

The measure is called seniority, and its definition is deliberately mechanical: the number of years it takes the median individual to first reach a given job title, computed within the same industry and the same firm-size quintile (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025). Firms are sorted by end-of-year headcount into quintiles that each hold 20% of that year's employment. So a title is never scored in the abstract. It is scored against the specific peer group of employers that issue it.

The authors are explicit about why they built it this way. The seniority measure, they write, "avoids the problem of fake promotions or title inflation where the change in job title carries little economic value."

Two properties make it operationally different from anything in your ATS.

It is not tenure

An individual's seniority can sit flat for a decade. In the authors' words, a person "can get 'stuck' at the same seniority level until the end of his or her career." Years in the labour market and position in the hierarchy are separate quantities, and the paper treats conflating them as the error to be fixed.

It prices titles against each other

Pooled across all industries, the median years-to-attainment for common titles runs (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025):

Look at the Director-to-Vice-President step: two years. If your internal ladder treats that promotion as a tier change worth a band jump, the market is telling you it is worth roughly two years of attainment. Meanwhile "Manager" sits at five — a title you probably hand out at three.

The underlying data are Lightcast's de-identified universe of over 150 million US profiles, with a 5.6 million-person identified sub-sample and wage estimates from Revelio Labs.

The Ladder Is Shorter Than Your Comp Bands Assume

The attainment curve is the finding that should change a leveling conversation. Of individuals with ten years of career history, 56% have reached seniority level 10 or above. At fifteen years, 37% have reached level 15. At twenty years, 19% have reached level 20 (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025).

Attainment does not keep pace with time served, and it stops early. For the cohort whose careers peak between levels 10 and 15, the curve flattens around twelve years after graduation. Careers are not even monotonic — the group with peak seniority between 10 and 15 averages below 10, which means people reach a level and then come back down.

Read that as a supply statement. Genuine senior attainment is scarce: roughly one in five careers of twenty years clears the top band. If your org chart carries more Directors than that scarcity implies, you did not hire into the market's distribution. You minted levels.

Job Title Inflation Is Measurable, and It Runs Against Employer Size

Here is where the research stops being an academic curiosity and starts repricing your screen.

Job title inflation is not a vibe; it has been caught in the act. Examining job postings around the Fair Labor Standards Act's $455-per-week salary-test threshold, Cohen, Gurun and Ozel found a nearly fivefold jump in managerial job postings exactly at that line — titles like "Director of First Impressions" attached to front-desk duties — worth an estimated $4 billion in avoided overtime in 2019 alone (Cohen, Gurun & Ozel, 2023).

And the practice has a size gradient. Among employers with $300 million to $1 billion in revenue or assets, the share using job titles as rewards reached about 40% in 2023, up from 14% in 2018. Below $300 million, it went from roughly 10% to 35%. Above $3 billion, it barely moved — about 25% in both years (Pearl Meyer via The Business Journals, 2024). Across the whole market, 37% of firms gave someone a promotion with no pay rise in 2023, up from 32% at the start of the decade (Korn Ferry, 2023).

Two consequences land directly on a 50-to-500-person operation.

The titles you receive are drawn from the most inflated part of the market. Your candidate pool is largely other mid-market firms — exactly the segment where title-as-reward roughly tripled in five years. Face-value title matching imports that inflation into your offer.

The titles you issue are the kind that inflated most. The same survey data say the dry promotion is a small-and-mid-company instrument, and it lands hardest on the youngest: 33% of Gen Z workers reported being offered one in a twelve-month window, against 3% of baby boomers (Pearl Meyer via The Business Journals, 2024). A retention lever that the market has learned to discount is not a retention lever.

Where the Non-Wage Signal Beats the Salary Signal

Seniority correlates with wages — but it carries information pay does not, and the paper quantifies how much.

Take job switchers whose previous job sat in wage decile five. Among those moving from the public sector into the private sector, the average destination wage decile ranges from 5.54 to 7.02 depending on their prior seniority. Among private-to-private movers, the same range compresses to 6.11 to 6.49 (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025). Where pay is flexible, salary already encodes most of what you need. Where pay is compressed, seniority is doing the work alone.

That has a practical reading for any employer hiring out of a band-constrained environment — public administration, education, healthcare systems, non-profits, or any firm with rigid salary structures. Candidates from those settings are systematically mispriced by their last salary. This inference is mine, not the authors' — the paper measures the public-to-private case specifically.

The paper also deflates a pedigree screen. Graduates of elite undergraduate colleges peak around seniority 12.5, about one year above Tier 2 graduates, who run about half a year above everyone else. Elite MBA holders reach a median peak of 17.5 against 15.0 for non-elite MBA holders (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025). Real effects — and small enough that most schools-based filters are over-weighted relative to what they buy.

The Honest Counter

Four limits, stated plainly.

The data are self-reported. Lightcast profiles come from a professional networking site: 77.6% of individuals have no career gaps and 6.2% of individual-year observations are gaps (Amornsiripanitch et al., 2025), but the sample skews white-collar by construction, because it only contains people who chose to build an online profile.

Seniority measures speed, not quality. It tells you how long a title typically takes. It does not tell you whether the person was good at it, what the scope of the role was, or whether the attainment came with real decision rights.

The pooled table is not the real measure. Those title medians are unconditional across all industries. The firm-size-normalized version — the one that makes the comparison valid — requires the licensed resume universe. You cannot reproduce it in a spreadsheet, and you should not pretend your internal benchmark is equivalent.

The authors did not write a hiring playbook. This is a September 2025 methods paper proposing a research measure, validated against wages, education and sector transitions. Applying it to req design is an operational extension, and the plateau result carries the usual censoring caveat: recent graduates have short observed careers.

What to Change Before Your Next Senior Offer Goes Out

Four moves, none of which needs new software.

1. Capture two numbers instead of one title. For every senior candidate, record the year they first attained the title and the approximate headcount of the employer at the time. That pair is the input the benchmark uses. The title string alone is not.
2. Normalize before you level, not after. A Director at a 40-person firm and a Director at a 4,000-person firm are different attainments by construction. Decide your mapping rule in advance and write it down, so the decision is a policy rather than a per-candidate negotiation.
3. Re-weight pedigree to what it actually buys. The measured elite-college differential is about one year of peak attainment. If your screen treats school tier as a tier change, you are paying a premium for a one-year effect.
4. Stop using titles as currency and make the internal signal measurable. The dry promotion is precisely what the seniority measure was designed to strip out — so it is also what a departing employee's next employer will strip out. Internal leveling holds up when it rests on competency measured per cycle and calibrated across managers rather than on the title someone carries; Scovai's performance and succession module computes a 9-box from that competency data and flags distribution drift during calibration, which is a worked reference for how that arithmetic can be structured.

Job title inflation is the cheapest thing a company can print, and the market has already learned to discount it. The signal that survives is how long it takes the median person in that industry, at a company that size, to get there.

So before your next senior offer goes out, answer that question for the candidate in front of you. If you cannot, you are not leveling a hire. You are reading a business card.