What the Heck is a “Head of”?

Job leveling is an important step when building a compensation philosophy. The process of job leveling isn’t easy, but it’s important to get it right. Titling employees is one of those tricky areas.

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There’s an open debate on the best practices for job titling, notably with Marc Andreesen and Mark Zuckerberg arguing for opposite camps. One side believes that titles are the cheapest form of compensation and should be given out freely to give a competitive advantage. The other side is more strict about granting high-level titles in order to implement proper leveling and ensure titles are meaningful and fair. 

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No matter which camp you fall into, there is one thing we can probably agree on: the “Head of” job title is confusing. What the heck does the “Head of” title mean? Let’s explore the data to find out.

The “Head of” Job Title

Consider roles like Head of Marketing, Head of Analytics, Head of Sales, and so on. These “Head of” job titles are fairly common, but the standard leveling frameworks fall short here.

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Where does your company land on using the “Head of” job title? It’s likely your organization falls into one of three buckets:

1. Never uses “Head Of” out of principle
2. Over-uses “Head Of” and has several employees with the title
3. Seldom uses “Head Of” for the unique cases where an employee has a disproportionate amount of company influence requisite with traditional org chart metrics, like span of control or org size
   

When we think of “Head of” positions, are these roles aligned with a Senior Manager, a Director, or a VP? The answer can mean tens of thousands of dollars in difference for an employee’s compensation, and set a very different bar for the level of work expected.

The Data on “Head of” Levels

We looked at Pave's dataset to analyze all “Head of” incumbent data points across 8,500+ customers. The findings show that a “Head of” can be any level from Senior IC or Manager to Director/Senior Director or Executive, and the breakdown varies somewhat by company size. 

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That said, a majority of the time, a “Head of” employee is leveled as a Director/Senior Director (M5-M6) by their organization. This is especially pronounced in companies with 3,000+ employees, where 69% of “Head of” leaders sit at the Director level.

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Why Use “Head of” vs “Director”?

If the majority of employees with a “Head of” title are leveled as Directors, why not just give them that title? There are a couple potential reasons organizations might do this:

• The rest of your organization has flat titles and you’re not yet ready to introduce a formal leveling system.
• Candidates will sometimes negotiate their title and prefer to be “Head of”.
• You expect the employee to grow into director-level responsibility and manage multiple teams, but that isn’t the scope of the role today.

It could also be a recruiting tool to attract candidates when competing against Director roles elsewhere. Pave data finds that when normalizing by family, level, and market tier (US only), there is a ~9% premium for employees with "Head of" in their title over employees with "Director" in their title.

The Data on “Head of” Base Salary

The next logical question is around “Head of” vs Director when it comes to salary. So, do “Heads Of X” get paid a salary premium to “Directors of X”? Or does “Head Of” compensation generally map one-to-one with Director compensation? 

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We looked at ~10,000 employees with the title “Head Of”, “Director”, and “VP” in USA Tier 1 markets. We decided to only look at one locale to take location (mostly) out of the equation as a potential confounding variable. Next, we looked at the median base salaries for all employees with the title “Director” vs. “Head Of” vs. “VP/Vice President”.

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Lastly, we broke down the results by job family. E.g. Does a “Head of Sales” err more towards “VP of Sales” whereas “Head of Design” errs more towards “Director of Design”? (Hint–the answer is yes to both.) This analysis is based on plain-text title matching rather than on actual mapped levels.

As we can see, in general, "Head of" titles tend to be paid more than directors but less than VPs. Interestingly, a “Head of X” in the R&D world (Design, Engineering, Product) tends to get paid closer to “Director”. In other departments however, a “Head Of X” tends to get paid somewhere in between “Director” and “VP”. One interesting potential outlier is “Head of Sales”, which generally gets paid a similar salary rate to “VP of Sales”.

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While this data helps us to demystify some of the questions around “Head of” vs Director, being thoughtful about titles and levels is key for compensation leaders. When you’re undertaking a benchmarking exercise at your organization, Pave Market Data is a great place to begin. Sign up for free today.