The rule I'm getting is:
Capitalize if it comes before the name: Janitor Richard McGill was a fastidious man. Director Campbell slept in the office as McGill the janitor proofread his annual report.
But I often find that writing certain titles un-capitalized just looks plain odd.
Here are three sentences where I want to capitalize. Could you comment on the grammaticality of the choice to do so?
- Just recently I met Mr. Adams (previously Managing Director and Finance Director at … (Could you also suggest a better SHORT sentence for writing this? Sounds clunky as I type it here. It is meant to convey that Mr. Adams was previously the managing director and before that a finance director at an organization. Also, I didn't feel the need to capitalize these titles as I talked about them in the previous sentence as I did when typing out the original sentence referred.)
2. My work experience as an Assistant Accountant at …
3. Mr. Stephen Colbert, Hiring Manager — at the start of a letter (this one I know is correct — my search shows that the work title at the top of a letter is almost always capitalized)
Best Answer
You capitalize titles when they are referring to a specific role in a specific organization, or a person that fills that specific role. This follows the basic principles for proper nouns: Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dr. Phil. For example, a chief executive officer leads a company, but Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook.
So, all of your examples are correct: you're referring to a specific role at a specific company. If you were writing about hiring managers in general, it wouldn't be capitalized.
As for your long example:
You might use a shorter word, like "formerly" or something, but I don't think you can make it too much shorter, given the length of the title.