A survey reported by The Hindu has documented a persistent mismatch between employees' job titles and their actual pay, finding that many workers hold senior-sounding designations while earning salaries well below what those titles typically command.

The findings matter directly for HR teams responsible for compensation benchmarking, promotion architecture and offer design. If internal titles inflate faster than pay bands, employers face retention risk, equity pressure and external-market credibility problems in recruitment.

What does the survey actually show?

The survey, highlighted by The Hindu under the headline "Grand titles, modest pay," points to a structural pattern rather than isolated cases: organizations awarding elevated designations — sometimes in place of meaningful salary increases — as a low-cost way to reward or retain employees.

This practice, often called title inflation, creates several measurable downstream effects for people functions:

• Compensation benchmarking against market data becomes unreliable, because external title-to-pay comparisons no longer match internal reality.
• Internal pay equity suffers when two employees with equivalent titles earn sharply different amounts.
• Recruitment teams must decode inflated titles when assessing external candidates' actual seniority.
• Promotion conversations grow harder, because the next title rung may already be exhausted without a corresponding pay movement.

Why do employers hand out grand titles?

The survey's core insight, as framed by The Hindu, is economic: a designation costs the company nothing, while a salary increase does. In tight labor markets or during periods of budget constraint, titles become a substitute currency — a way to acknowledge tenure, expanded scope or retention concerns without touching the payroll.

The risk is that the mismatch compounds. Once one team inflates titles, market comparison forces others to follow, and the entire external reference system for seniority erodes. Candidates arriving with impressive designations may expect compensation the role's actual responsibilities do not support.

What should HR teams do about it?

The survey's findings suggest several due-diligence questions for compensation and talent leaders:

• Do internal title ladders map cleanly to salary bands, or have the two systems drifted apart?
• Are promotion decisions reviewed jointly by compensation and talent functions, or do titles get awarded unilaterally as retention gestures?
• When benchmarking against external market data, does the analysis adjust for known title inflation in the source market?
• Is there a documented path to correct legacy title mismatches before they distort the next pay-cycle decisions?

For employers in markets where the survey found the pattern most pronounced — the research was conducted in India — the data raises a sharper question about whether title-based compensation structures can survive contact with increasingly transparent salary information.

What comes next?

As salary transparency norms spread and candidates gain easier access to market pay data, the gap between designation and compensation will become harder to sustain. Employers that audit their title-to-pay alignment now, ahead of the next benchmarking cycle, will face fewer awkward conversations when employees price their own titles against the market.