Want a C-suite job? The 10 fastest-growing 'chief' titles (from LinkedIn)
A new report from LinkedIn reveals the hiring of certain C-suite positions has skyrocketed, with chief diversity and inclusion officer topping the list.
Move over, chief executive officer and chief financial officer. Several popular titles are being added to the nation’s C-suites, a LinkedIn study of hiring patterns found. Four C-suite titles have seen more than 100% growth from 2019 through 2022:
- Chief diversity and inclusion officer, 169%
- Chief delivery officer, 166%
- Chief people officer, 144%
- Chief growth officer, 118%
Rounding out the 10 fastest-growing titles are chief revenue officer (76%), chief legal officer (72%), chief program officer (60%), chief commercial officer (60%), chief underwriting officer (53%) and chief human resources officer (50%).
Despite the trend, however, chief diversity hires declined by 4.5% last year. Corporate leaders’ recession worries caused them to take a harder look at the bottom line, reporter Ebony Flake wrote in Essence magazine. As a result, “many have quietly divested from commitments to diversity and inclusion,” she said.
A recent Harvard Business Review survey of 40 diversity program leaders across the nation came to similar conclusions. In the wake of 2020’s killing of George Floyd, “much was promised, but little was delivered,” the authors wrote. “There are no shortcuts or easy answers.”
The C-suite titles with the fastest hiring growth tend to oversee areas where organizations want to get better in a hurry. The role of chief people officer, for example, has risen to prominence at many tech companies as part of an overall desire to be smarter about hiring and retention; to have a fuller understanding of hybrid work; and to think more strategically about workplace culture.
Related: Three ways to cultivate a stronger CEO-CHRO partnership
Chief delivery officers are becoming more common in fields such as IT services, software development and business consulting. They may be downstream from product and sales teams, but their entry into the C-suite gives them more clout to make sure clients are truly getting the promised benefits, functionality and timeliness.
“The rise of titles such as chief growth officer and chief revenue officer speak to a more holistic approach to the ways that functions such as marketing, sales, product and finance all work together,” the report concluded. “Such roles have existed in consulting companies for a while; they now are becoming more common in fields such as advertising, health care and financial services, too.”