Target responsibility, not wording
Oscar Research categorises public-sector posts by the functions and responsibilities they actually carry, not just the words in their job title. That allows users to select one standardised functional category and find relevant postholders across organisations even when every organisation calls the role something different.
Job-title targeting looks precise until you use it in the real public sector.
You decide you want Finance Directors, search for the word “Finance” and immediately hit two problems: some relevant people do not have Finance in their title, and some people who do have Finance in their title are not the decision-maker you were trying to reach.
Then somebody suggests adding “Financial”, “Resources”, “Treasurer”, “S151”, “Corporate Services” and another half-dozen keywords.
The search gets larger. It does not necessarily get better.
The problem with public-sector job titles
There is no universal naming convention for senior roles across Government and Public Services.
The same broad responsibility can sit under titles such as:
- Director of Finance;
- Executive Director of Resources;
- Chief Finance Officer;
- Strategic Director — Corporate Resources;
- Section 151 Officer;
- Director of Corporate Services;
- Chief Operating Officer;
- or something unique to that organisation's structure.
And one role can carry several responsibilities at once.
For consistent targeting across hundreds or thousands of organisations, the second is usually more useful.
The finance example: 400 organisations, 297 different titles
Oscar tested this against one of the clearest statutory roles in Local Government: the Statutory Chief Finance Officer.
You might expect such a well-defined responsibility to produce relatively standard job titles. It does not.
organisations in the original Oscar analysis had a statutory Chief Finance Officer post.
different job titles appeared across those 400 official posts.
of those different titles did not contain the word “Finance” or “Financial”.
Oscar found that even a search using more than ten plausible keywords — including terms such as Finance, Financial, S151, Resources and Treasurer — still failed to identify every correct person and produced false positives that then needed manual removal.
That is the weakness of title matching in one example.
Now multiply that problem across the whole public sector
Finance is relatively straightforward because the statutory responsibility gives researchers something concrete to verify.
Other functions are less tidy.
Who owns digital transformation? Cyber security? Net zero? Estates strategy? Children's commissioning? Procurement? Workforce transformation? Data and analytics?
The answer can depend on organisation type, size, structure and how responsibilities have been combined locally.
A keyword search cannot understand that organisational context by itself.
What Oscar means by Functional Intelligence
Oscar uses standardised functional categories to create a consistent layer above the raw job title.
There are more than 700 standardised job-function categories, grouped into functional areas so users can target at the level of granularity appropriate to the task.
A post can carry more than one functional category because real jobs often span several areas of responsibility.
The result is that the same functional query can work across organisations with completely different titles and structures.
How does Oscar decide which function a post belongs to?
Understand the organisation
Researchers first look at where the post sits in the organisation rather than treating the title as an isolated phrase.
Check published information
Organisation charts, service pages, committee papers, role information and other public sources help establish responsibility.
Ask the organisation where needed
When responsibility is unclear, Oscar can contact the organisation directly to establish which post fulfils a particular function.
Assign the functional categories
The relevant standardised category or categories are attached to the post so the responsibility can be selected consistently across the wider market.
Job title search vs functional targeting
| Approach | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Exact job title | Very precise when you already know the exact title. | Misses equivalent roles using different wording. |
| Keyword search | Fast way to broaden a title search. | Creates false positives and still misses responsibilities hidden behind unrelated titles. |
| Seniority alone | Useful for narrowing the organisational level. | Does not tell you what the person is responsible for. |
| Functional category | Finds the responsibility consistently across varying titles and structures. | Requires the underlying posts to have been researched and classified properly. |
| Function + seniority + organisation | Combines responsibility, authority and market fit. | Depends on having structured data across all three dimensions. |
Why false positives matter
A false positive is not just an untidy spreadsheet row.
It means somebody receives a message that is irrelevant to their actual job.
At scale that creates:
- lower campaign relevance;
- wasted sales time;
- poor response rates;
- more manual list-cleaning;
- weaker brand perception;
- and misleading assumptions about the size of the addressable audience.
Better classification therefore improves more than database accuracy. It changes the quality of the go-to-market strategy built on top of it.
Why false negatives may be even more expensive
The bigger problem is often the person you never find.
If the relevant decision-maker is a Director of Resources and your query only asks for Finance Directors, there is no warning saying “you missed the statutory finance lead”.
The person simply does not appear.
That can make a market look smaller than it really is and can leave entire organisations absent from a campaign.
Functions also survive organisational change better than titles
This becomes particularly useful during restructures.
A council can merge two directorates, an ICB can consolidate leadership, or an academy trust can centralise several services. The title may change completely while the underlying responsibility still has to exist somewhere.
Functional research asks: where did the responsibility go?
That is a much more durable question than: does this organisation still employ somebody with the old title?
One post can have several functions
Real organisational structures are rarely one-person-one-function.
A Director of Resources might carry responsibility for Finance, HR, Procurement and ICT. A Chief Operating Officer may cover Estates, Transformation and Corporate Services. A council Cabinet Member may hold a portfolio spanning Environment, Transport and Climate.
Oscar can therefore attach multiple functional categories to a single post where the evidence supports it.
This means users do not have to choose between oversimplifying the post or building increasingly complicated title searches.
Natural-language search still needs structured meaning underneath it
An AI interface can make it easier to ask for “the person responsible for cyber security in every council”, but the quality of the answer still depends on whether the underlying data knows what responsibility each post actually carries. Better interfaces do not remove the need for researched functional classification — they make it more valuable.
What does good public-sector targeting look like?
The strongest audience definition usually combines several dimensions rather than relying on one field:
- organisation type — who is relevant;
- geography — where they operate;
- function — what they are responsible for;
- seniority — the level of authority required;
- structure — parent, subsidiary, trust, system or group relationships;
- intelligence — what is changing around the organisation.
Job title can still be useful. It just should not be asked to carry all of that meaning on its own.
The simplest example
If you want every statutory Chief Finance Officer across UK councils, you can try to build and maintain a keyword search covering hundreds of titles.
Or, in Oscar, you select the relevant standardised functional category.
That is Functional Intelligence in one sentence: select the responsibility once, instead of guessing every possible way an organisation might have named it.
About the case study
The finance example and methodology in this article are based on Oscar Research's original Functional Intelligence analysis. The example recorded 400 official Statutory Chief Finance Officer posts, 297 different job titles and 227 title variants without the words “Finance” or “Financial”.