can my resume list a different title than my real one?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

For some reason — largely due to how bad the job market currently is for replaceable lifelong individual contributors — I’ve been following one of those quasi-influencer recruiter types on LinkedIn for a little while. Some of his advice is decent, and at the very least he pokes fun of all the problems with job-seeking in 2025. But this appeared on my LinkedIn feed just now:

“Your job title matters. If your company gave you an internal title that no one understands, tweak it to something more industry-standard. Just keep it accurate…don’t inflate it. Your resume should be clear to an outsider, not just your past company.”

Wouldn’t this just open a candidate up to confusion at best during a reference check? Personally my own title is definitely more grandiose in name than in practice, but if I changed “ABC” to something more accurate like “XYZ” in order to get a new role and then they called my current manager to ask whether I was in fact XYZ, surely that would raise questions with the potential new employer about my trustworthiness and accuracy.

Interested to hear whether my suspicion was right or if I’m wildly off-base here!

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that you want to avoid problems where a prospective employer verifies your title during a reference check or background check and discovers it’s wrong.

It’s also true that it’s important for your resume to convey what your role really was, and some titles really don’t do a good job of that.

For example, let’s say you have a vague title like Analyst Level 1. One easy solution to that is to list your correct title but then a more explanatory one in parentheses immediately following it, like this:

Taco Institute, Analyst Level 1 (Taco Strategy Coordinator)

Or you could even do that in reverse:

Taco Institute, Taco Strategy Coordinator (Analyst Level 1)

That way, it’s clear what your job was but you won’t look like you were being misleading if they confirm it. (That assumes that the bulk of your work really is taco strategy, of course. Your descriptive title needs to be accurate.)

But let’s say you left out Analyst Level 1 entirely, and that came up in a background check. It’s not guaranteed that it would disqualify you; they might be perfectly capable of figuring out that the work is indeed the work of a taco strategy coordinator, and there might be no issues with moving forward. But it also might not go that way, and it’s better not to introduce the possibility of problems.

What you definitely can’t do is to give yourself a promotion. If your title is Taco Strategy Coordinator, you can’t list yourself as Director of Taco Strategy, even if you’re working at a director level and believe your title should have reflected that all along. However, in that case, you’d make very sure that the other info you list for that job makes clear the level you were working at.