How to Filter a Lead List by Job Title Seniority (Without Apollo or Sales Navigator)

To filter a lead list by seniority, turn each job title into a level with rules, most senior first, then keep the levels that buy what you sell. Lead databases do this for you when you search, but a CSV from a scrape, an event, an old export or a client usually has only a raw title column. Expand abbreviations (Sr., Mgr, SVP), catch assistant titles before they match "CEO", then map founder/owner, C-level, VP, director, manager, senior IC and IC. Pick levels by company size, cap contacts per company, and verify the result before you send.

The free job title seniority filter does the mapping in your browser and adds a department column too. Here's how the rules work and how to choose levels.

How databases do it

Apollo's People API search (read 2 November 2026) describes its seniority filter as "the job seniority that people hold within their current employer" and lists eleven values: owner, founder, c_suite, partner, vp, head, director, manager, senior, entry and intern. Two rules from the same page matter when you rebuild this yourself:

• "Searches only return results based on their current job title." A former director who is now a VP doesn't match the director filter.
• A person only needs to match one of the seniorities you pick, so levels combine with OR.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a Seniority level filter too; its filter definitions page says only "filter by seniority level to find leads matching your ideal customer profile", without publishing how the level is derived. Either way, the level comes from the title. If you already have the titles, you can do the same.

The rules, most senior first

Order matters, because many titles contain more than one level word. "VP, Office of the CEO" contains "CEO"; "Senior Manager" contains "Senior". Check the highest level first and stop at the first match:

Level	Title words	Examples
Owner	founder, co-founder, owner	Founder & CEO, Owner
C-level	chief, CEO, CFO, CTO, COO, CMO, president, managing director	Chief Revenue Officer, President
VP	VP, vice president, SVP, EVP, partner	SVP Sales, Partner
Director	director, head of, general manager	Head of Growth, Director of IT
Manager	manager, lead, supervisor	Marketing Manager, Team Lead
Senior IC	senior, staff, principal, architect	Senior Engineer, Principal Designer
IC	any other title	Account Executive, Analyst
Intern	intern, student, trainee	Marketing Intern

Three fixes before matching:

1. Expand abbreviations. Sr. to senior, Mgr to manager, Dir to director, Hd to head. Otherwise "Sr. Dir. Marketing" matches nothing.
2. Catch assistants first. "Executive Assistant to the CEO" and "Assistant to the VP" are support roles, not C-level or VP. Look for "assistant to", "executive assistant", "EA to" and "PA to" before the executive words. "Chief of Staff" is a judgment call; most rules will read it as C-level.
3. Watch the word "partner". "Partner" at a law or consulting firm is senior; "Partner Manager" and "Channel Partner Lead" are managers. Match "partner" as a level only when it isn't followed by manager, marketing or success.

The seniority filter applies these rules, reads common German, French and Spanish titles (Geschäftsführer, directeur, gerente, Leiter), and puts rows with no title in a "No title" level you can tick or leave out. Rules still misread some titles: "Chief Happiness Officer" is C-level by its words, so scan the C-level rows before sending.

Add a department

Seniority alone isn't targeting. "Director" in finance and "Director" in engineering buy different things. A second column from title keywords fixes that: sales (account executive, business development, SDR, revenue), marketing (growth, brand, demand gen), engineering, product and design, IT and security, finance, people and HR, operations, customer success, and legal. Founders and CEOs with no function in the title are their own group. Filter on both: "Director or VP, in Marketing" is a target; "Director" is a crowd.

Which levels to keep

It depends on company size more than on your offer.

Company size	Usually the best first contact	Second wave
1-20 people	Founder, owner, CEO	None; one or two people is plenty
20-200	Head of or director of the function; C-level for that function	The founder if no reply
200-2,000	Director or head of the team that owns the problem	VP of the function
2,000+	Manager or director who runs the team day to day	Director or VP, referencing the first contact

At larger companies CEOs and VPs get the most cold email and pass it down. Going to the person who feels the problem tends to get a reply or a referral. Whatever levels you pick, don't email everyone at once: pair the filter with limit contacts per company to keep two or three per account. Our post on how many contacts per company to email has caps by company size.

Verify after filtering, not before

Filter first: there's no point checking the addresses of interns you won't email. Then verify what's left, because titles and addresses decay together. When someone changes jobs, the title in an old export is wrong and the address at the old company often stops working. Senior people also move more visibly and are scraped more often, so lists of executives can carry addresses guessed from a pattern.

Upload the filtered file on the verify page. Send to valid rows; for risky rows, remember that catch-all domains (common at larger companies behind gateways) and Microsoft consumer mailboxes can't always be confirmed. Our post on B2B contact data decay covers how fast lists go stale.

Where SimpleVerifier fits

The seniority filter is free and runs in your browser. For the mailbox check, the first 100 checks are free with a Google sign-in. Pro is $39 a month with the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off. See pricing.