It sounds like they were very upfront with you about what the job would entail. How is that lying? And the reality at a large company is that many people spend a lot of time coordinating, sharing information, gathering requirements, etc. even if their nominal job is market research or whatever.

I would expect that there would be presentations and meetings to share the products of the research. It's an entirely different thing be primarily performing project and stakeholder management.

The only way I found out about the true nature of the position is from an informal informational with a member of that team. The job posting itself mentioned nothing about project management and glossed over the stake holder management part. This is very misleading. Plus, if the majority of the position is project management, then they should probably title it as such.

More jobs involve a lot more of that sort of thing than you're crediting I think. A lot of our research projects involve collaborating with regional teams around the world and other marketing groups on budgets, research content, etc. There's the outside firm that's actually doing the survey to be managed. And probably a bunch of other things that I'm not directly involved with. Sometimes you have dedicated program managers for certain tasks at a large company but a lot of people spend a lot of their time essentially collaborating with other people.

I've run into this problem, there could be multiple reasons: standard job descriptions that are used over and over, jobs changing shape while the company is screening applicants, unclear objectives on part of the hiring managers, etc.

We try to have the peers review the job descriptions before the reqs go out but often engineers don't spend the time it takes and sometimes there's HR lingo the company wants in the description.