Job Title Property in Association

[dr8k]

It seems contacts are designed to record their job title as a property of the contact. However, this doesn't really reflect reality: their job title is a factor or their association to a company. We have contacts we manage who have moved around various employers, and it would be valuable to know they were (for instance) an infrastructure manager at Company A, the IT Manager at Company B, and the CIO at Company C. However, I can't find a way to do this without creating an enormous number of association labels. It would be much better for us to be able to create an association from the contact to the company of "employee" and then have an association text property where we could enter the job title they had while there. 

Is there a better way of doing this?

[franksteiner79 · Accepted solution]

Hi @dr8k 

From what you are describing, you should have one contact record with changing email addresses. In HubSpot email is the unique identifier so I would always recommend having multiple contacts in the scenario you are describing even though it is the same person. Let me explain:

1. There is a 50 limit for association labels, so using them to represent job titles means you will be running into this limit quickly.
2. If a person moves job, I would use assocation labels as follows:
   • to mark the contact's old company relationship as "left company" or "former employee", this maintains their historie - activities, deals, etc. but marks them as not working there anymore
   • associate the "old contact" and the "new one" with a "previous role" or similar label so there is context and it is clear this is not a duplicate
3. So let's say I change companies three times you would have in your system as follows:
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Manager) - Company A - Label: former employer/employee
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Manager) - Company B - Label: former employer/employee
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Director) - Company C - Label: Primary Company

Hope that helps.

Frank

[RBozeman · Accepted solution]

Hey @dr8k - One simple way to do this without running into the association labels problem above might be to put all of that data into a custom field and aggregate it. For instance a contact might have "McDonalds - Cashier, Burger King - Manager" in the field or something like that. 

Or you could split them off into other custom fields like "Previous Employer 1" "Previous Job Title 1" etc. 

If you want to use the associations and labels, I would say that you will probably need some kind of automated data management solution to move the data around and create the associations in bulk or automatically. Insycle can help with that. Full disclosure I work for them. But Insycle has really deep automatic association features. Here's an article that breaks it down. 

[franksteiner79 · Accepted solution]

Hi @dr8k 

From what you are describing, you should have one contact record with changing email addresses. In HubSpot email is the unique identifier so I would always recommend having multiple contacts in the scenario you are describing even though it is the same person. Let me explain:

1. There is a 50 limit for association labels, so using them to represent job titles means you will be running into this limit quickly.
2. If a person moves job, I would use assocation labels as follows:
   • to mark the contact's old company relationship as "left company" or "former employee", this maintains their historie - activities, deals, etc. but marks them as not working there anymore
   • associate the "old contact" and the "new one" with a "previous role" or similar label so there is context and it is clear this is not a duplicate
3. So let's say I change companies three times you would have in your system as follows:
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Manager) - Company A - Label: former employer/employee
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Manager) - Company B - Label: former employer/employee
   • Frank Steiner (Marketing Director) - Company C - Label: Primary Company

Hope that helps.

Frank

[DSharma02]

Hi @dr8k ,

Creating a large number of association labels may seem cumbersome, but IMO it can be managed effectively if planned well and also the best way to reolve this issue. However, if you want a better way tio do it, with Enterprise subscription, you can create Custom Object to manage job titles and can store records of, associated companies, and associated contacts. (You can take a trial also first). 

Hope this helps!
Thanks
Or Use the notes feature on the contact record to document job title changes.