Capitalizing Work Titles -- Beyond General Rules

Question

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)

phyrfox · 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:

Just recently I met Mr. Adams (previously Managing Director and Finance Director...

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.

Nelli · Answer

My answer to this question has always been to capitalize when it is an extension of the proper noun, for example: First Lady, Melania Trump.

If it is simply the title, it is not capitalized, for example: We will be joined by the president and first lady at the conference today.

It looks strange for those titles to be in lower case, but it is correct.  Also, if there is the word "the" in front of the title, it changes from a proper noun (name) to simply a noun (item).

Capitalizing Work Titles -- Beyond General Rules

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