BuyWithMe Annoints Chief People Officer

Daily deal site BuyWithMe announced Tuesday that it has hired former Google HR honcho Charlie Gray to help lure top talent to the daily deal site.

One of the interesting things about the appointment is Gray’s not-so-typical job title: Chief People Officer.

What do you have to do to get a job like that? Well, Gray has an admirable resumé. He was executive vice president at AOL’s local news division Patch, where he managed the company’s growth from 100 employees in 30 locations to 1,400 employees in more than 800 locations within a year. At Google, he was the human resources guru overseeing 1,500 staffers in 12 offices for Google’s U.S. and Canada sales and operations and helped restructure that sales force into a “vertical expert model,” that helped Google woo Fortune 1000 customers.

As Jim Crowley, CEO of BuyWithMe, Inc., wrote: “Charlie has tremendous experience helping some of the world’s best companies rapidly scale their talent base while at the same time helping those companies create cultures where excellence and extraordinary execution are the touchstone of the entire organization.”

Apparently, that takes him from blah Human Resources Director to the more bow-inspiring title of Chief People Officer. But Gray is not the only one with an unusual title among companies that specialize in areas like tech, new media and environmentally sound products. Here are a few others.

Zynga has avatars, and a Chief People Officer. At Zynga, where the management team headshots are all their game avatars, the top guns have pretty standard titles. Except for Colleen McCreary, whose avatar is wearing a Red Sox hat and is also the company's Chief People Officer . (The avatar suggests a sense of fun, but note to Zynga applicants: We’d think twice before wearing that Yankees tie to the interview.)

Social Media Divas and Swamis: We’ve yet to run across anyone who officially uses these titles (and consider ourselves lucky in that regard), but they are reportedly quite common in the social media sphere. Wendy Weber, president of recruiting agency Crandall Associates is not impressed, telling ClickZ recently that, "They sound like fun, but I don't like them. Titles exist to provide an indication of someone's job function. I know what 'social media' is, but I don't know what a social media 'diva' does.” Well, she probably doesn't care if you know or not either.

Chief Inspired Protagonist: Green cleaning products giant Seventh Generation’s cofounder Jeffrey Hollender held the title of chief-inspired protagonist when he spoke to Portfolio.com in the winter of 2010, but the board must have considered him an antagonist, since he was forced out of the company later that year. He’s now an author and consultant.

Google Fellows and Doodlers: Stealing a page from academia, Google hires undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy to spend the summer working in its Google Policy Fellowship program as “Google Fellows.” The 2011 fellows, some of who have posted to its blog about various policies, were paid $7,500 for 10 weeks—not much but we bet this a paid internship that makes for a killer addition to the resumé later on. Another title at the search engine giant is Google Doodlers—that's what the artists who play around with Google’s logo are called.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com