No it's clearly not.

It's very clearly implying they had a job with the title "associate".

Exactly. No information is better than inaccurate information.

No it doesn't. It clearly could mean that, but it literally just means the person has associated with the company. I don't know why they'd use language that could create that confusion, but it's not straightforward dishonesty.

It could mean that, but not clearly, and it really doesn't mean that.

Setting aside whether it is a good practice or not, if all of these agencies know that Apple does this, then it becomes a de facto meangingless term.

If this has been an ongoing practice for a while and an agency is not aware of it, then it is a bad agency to work with.

So your answer is "It's ok to be misleading. And because you don't know you're being mislead it's your fault"?

Yeah I have a very different opinion of that situation.

They literally pre-empted this response at the beginning of the comment

> It's a generic term that is commonly synonymous with employee.

It is not. It implies an entry level/unskilled/probationary position.

You would call a person who works tier 1 support an associate, or works the cash register in an Apple store, or a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 2 months. You would not call a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 18 months an associate.

If you've got a stack of applicants and one of them comes up with some bullshit like their previous employer claims their job title was Associate and they claim their actual job title was Software Engineer, that means I either have to do legwork to figure out what's actually happening, is this person lying about their experience etc, or just hire someone else. It's not a disqualifying characteristic, but if the resume says one thing and the background check says a different thing, that's a red flag. Sometimes the red flag is nothing, basically all of us have had a scumbag for an employer at various points in our careers, who's might to lie about us to future employers just because they're spiteful. But red flags have to be chased down and verified before you can hire someone with red flags on their resume.

Right now, in 2022, I would just hire them if they had a pulse, red flags or not. But when the next recession happens? And we've gone through three rounds of layoffs, and only now are positions opening up in onesies and twosies and there are 40 applicants? I'm just going to discard the 30 resumes with red flags. Among the 10 remaining resumes I'm gonna interview the 5 who went to the best schools and had the most experience.