Occupations - what job a title actually means

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Every job title on a CV gets read twice: once as the words the person wrote, and once as the job those words mean. The second one is the occupation, and it is what lets a search for "finance people" find a Financial Controller, a Management Accountant and a Finance Manager without anyone typing all three.

Where the occupation comes from

Lovelio keeps a title book: a shared dictionary of job titles and the occupation each one means. A title is looked up once, ever, and every candidate who holds it afterwards is answered from the book. That is why importing 60,000 people does not cost 60,000 lookups.

Each entry is filed against ISCO-08, the international standard for occupation groups. That filing is what rolls a career up: five years as a Financial Controller and three as a Management Accountant both sit under Finance Professionals, so "8 years in finance" is a fact Lovelio can compute rather than a claim someone typed.

Why some titles are deliberately blank

A lot of job titles do not name a job. "Director" is held by 1,510 people in a book we tested on, and it means a different job in nearly every one of them - a board director, a director of nursing, someone who owns a two-person company. "Consultant", "Manager", "Associate" and "Partner" are the same.

Lovelio leaves those blank rather than picking the most common one. This matters more than it sounds: an occupation that was guessed gets written onto a person's record, and from then on they answer searches they have nothing to do with, with nothing on screen to say the answer was invented.

A title is also left blank when:

• The two AI models that check each other disagree about what it means.
• The best answer came back under the confidence bar.
• The title genuinely names more than one job - "Engineer" on its own could be civil, software or sales.

Blank is a real answer here, not a gap. The search still finds these people by their titles, their skills and their CV text - they just do not carry an occupation.

Generic titles get a second look

When the title says nothing, Lovelio looks at the person instead: who they worked for, what that employer does, their skills, and the other jobs they have held.

The rule it follows is narrow on purpose. The employer alone is enough only where the firm's business IS the work - an Associate at a consultancy is a management consultant, a Partner at a law firm is a lawyer, because consulting and law are what those firms sell. At any other kind of employer the industry says what the company does, not what the person does, so their skills or their job history have to agree before Lovelio will answer.

Most "Director" and "General Manager" records stay blank even after this. That is the intended outcome.

Titles Lovelio would not place

Nobody at your agency is asked to decide what a title means. There used to be a job-titles list on Settings > Review queue; it was removed in September 2026 because it put thousands of decisions in front of recruiters who had no reason to make them.

Lovelio settles those titles itself, on a weekly pass:

• A rank word on its own ("Director", "Partner", "Consultant", "Manager") is recorded as having no single function. The people holding it are read from their employer, skills and history instead, as above.
• A title only a handful of people hold is never a question at all.
• Everything else is settled from evidence, with no human. Lovelio reads the people holding the title: their skills, what their employers do, and the titles they held before and after. It builds two independent evidence sets, one per agency where two or more agencies hold the title, and asks the stronger model to read each on its own. Two agencies whose people say the same thing is a fact about the title, not about one database. If the two readings agree, the title is settled with that reading and marked as settled from evidence. If either refuses or they disagree, it is recorded as having no single function, the same answer a human dismiss gives.
• History can tell Lovelio what kind of work a title is, never its level. The rung comes from the title's own words; a title whose holders went on to be directors is not a director title.

An admin can still settle one title by hand through Ask Lovelio ("set Director to Managing Director" or "Director has no single function"). That answer beats both AI models permanently; nothing Lovelio runs later will quietly change it.

Where you see it

The occupation shows on the candidate record next to their title, and it drives the experience rollups - the "X years in finance" style facts on a profile and in search. When a candidate has no occupation, nothing is shown rather than a guess.