A system and method for determining organizational hierarchy from contact data. A phrase having multiple terms representing a job title is received and converted to lower case, then concatenated with a symbol to separate the terms. The phrase is compared to a training set of predefined normalized phrases representing known job titles. If a match is found, a data record is created or updated with organizational hierarchy information associated with the matched phrase in the training set. If a match is not found, a term is removed from the phrase and the comparison repeated.