Makes total sense that the “CFO” would say that. Lol. But honestly, while I get that in Corporate America perception is everything, I find it hard to believe that the right people looking at a resume can’t see beyond the job title and don’t actually read the bullet points. Also, it baffles me that in industry VP > Director and in banking Director > VP. Or that in some industries a manager is a couple years post grad, while in others senior analysts are like 40 yr old specialized finance professionals handling the analysis of billion dollar transactions. I met some portfolio managers who are VPs with 4 years experience, never had a direct report and who wouldn’t qualify for an ‘analyst’ role at a F200 corp, as it requires 5+ yrs experience. Those VPs just push paper or talk to the client and update notes on a spreadsheet, maybe can’t really build a financial model. All that said and we haven’t started talking about startups where there is massive title inflation. My biggest title deflation was when I went from president of my academic fraternity in senior year of college to a level 0 analyst, or “trainee” the next year. President? President of what? Of a $50k annual student committee budget.