Every job title on your careers page describes a job as it existed in 2019, and hiring against it is how you staff a company for a market that no longer exists. 'Content Marketer', 'Data Analyst', 'Product Manager' — these were bundles of tasks, and AI just unbundled them. The writing, the querying, the ticket-grooming: increasingly done by machines in minutes. What's left — and what you should actually hire for — is the loop: can this person take a brief and return a shipped thing, take a market signal and return revenue, take a recurring problem and return a system that makes it stop recurring? Titles describe categories of activity. Loops describe closure. Hire for closure.
Why titles stopped describing jobs
- Titles are trailing indicators: they codify the task bundle of five years ago, then HR systems, salary bands and job boards freeze them in place.
- AI eats task bundles asymmetrically. A 'content marketer' whose job was 80% drafting is now a different job — but the title, the JD and the interview loop haven't noticed.
- Titles invite category matching in interviews: 'have you been this before?' The market now rewards 'can you close this loop?' — a question titles cannot answer.
- Inside companies, titles fence work: 'that's not my job' is a title-shaped sentence. Loops make ownership explicit: the loop is yours until it's closed.
- The best people already describe themselves in loops. Ask a strong operator what they do and you'll hear 'I take X and turn it into Y' — never a title.
How to write a loop-shaped job description
Replace the title-plus-responsibilities format with three sections: the loop, the systems, and the proof. The loop states the input you'll hand them and the output you expect ('you receive positioning briefs; four weeks later there is a shipped campaign with instrumented results'). The systems section names what they'll build and operate — the eval harness, the enrichment pipeline, the agent stack — because in an AI company the artifact that outlives any single task is the system. The proof section tells candidates what to bring: not a CV of titles, but one loop they closed end-to-end, with the messy middle included. You will get fewer applicants. That is the point — title-shaped JDs attract title-shaped candidates.
Yes, titles still exist outside your walls
The honest caveat: titles remain a currency for visas, salary benchmarks, LinkedIn and the candidate's next job. Don't punish people by refusing them one. Give everyone a legible external title and then ignore it internally. The failure isn't having titles — it's letting them define who does what, who gets hired, and who gets paid. Use titles the way you use a mailing address: necessary for the outside world, irrelevant to what happens inside the house.
