IT’S TIME TO SIMPLIFY JOB TITLES TO HELP JOB SEEKERS FIND WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING FOR.

The significance of appropriate and meaningful job titling is often overlooked by recruiters and hiring managers, particularly when it comes to externally advertising them. Internally, job titles might need to align to organization-specific nomenclature, functions, teams and HR process and documentation. But externally, they need to be synonymous with general conventions and the expectations of job seekers to maximize the opportunity for them finding the most relevant jobs.

Examples of the challenge in practice can be seen in the retail sector, where job titles can vary considerably for fundamentally the same role (or at least for similar skills and experience requirements): retail advisor, retail assistant, customer assistant, customer team member, sales associate, crew member, store associate, cashier… the list goes on. Across specialist knowledge worker roles, it’s a more fragmented challenge where many job titles will not resonate, meaning potential candidates simply won’t recognize opportunities even if they’re presented to them. And let’s not even mention the overmarketed job titles that include words like ninja, guru, rock star, genius, etc.

Data from Radancy’s career site network shows the impact this is having on candidate job search behaviors. We took a sample from over 75 million job searches across our network of career sites from January to Sept 2021 and compared them to the same period in 2022.Here’s what we found:

• 49% of all job searches come from candidates who leave both the keyword and location field blank (they just hit the search button), up 11.6% Year over Year (YoY)
• 40% of all job searches include a location, down 16.6% YoY
• 15% of all job searches include a keyword, down 3% YoY
• 35% of all job searches include only a location, down 14.7% YoY
• 11% of all job searches include only a keyword, up 15.2% YoY
• 0.4% of all job searches included a location named “remote,” up 448% YoY
• 2% of all job searches include keywords related to “remote” (e.g. telecommute, work from home, WFH, etc.), up 95.4% YoY.

What does this job search behavior data tell us?

The fact that almost half of all career site job searches are being left blank (with users just clicking the search button) indicates that job seekers don’t know what to search for and don’t want to limit their results. This is a by-product of job titles historically being over-engineered, overmarketed, too broad, too internally focused and often containing too many acronyms and abbreviations. Job seekers are instead wanting to see all results and filter their preferences accordingly, which is then likely to be by location (including any remote/hybrid preferences that might be available in the filters), job category/career area and/or by career level (such as graduate or experienced). Another driver of this behavior is the increase in people switching industries (covered in more detail in our segment below). When people switch industries, they are even less likely to know what to search for on an employer’s career site.

As remote and hybrid working preferences have become more prevalent among job seekers, it’s expected that we see locations being used by fewer users than in the same period last year. Country location will still be of importance to many, but less so at the town and city levels.

When keywords are used, the most common tend to be employer- and sector-agnostic words, such as “remote” (a significant increase on last year), “intern/internship,’’ ”marketing,” etc. There may also be employer-specific words used for their key volume hiring areas, such as “nurse” for hospitals. The key point here is that keywords do not get used that much by users, but if they do it tends to be “remote” (and synonyms thereof).

What can talent acquisition do to optimize job titles and the job seeker experience?

The future of work may very well see employers move away from job titles altogether, but until then, here are some tips to ensure you reach the widest possible audience with your job advertising:

1. Audit your job titles to ensure they resonate with the widest possible audience when publishing them on your career site and your job advertising channels, even if this means changing the internal job title to something that better resonates externally.
   
2. Consider the various rules and optimization techniques for job boards and search engines. Adding locations, reference numbers, etc. into job titles can actually be counterproductive as some boards may penalize you for trying to overoptimize or game the system, even if this was not the intention.
   
3. Make sure your career site not only has the job search functionality front and center on the homepage, and is easily accessible sitewide, but that users can conduct a search without needing to enter any search terms (such as a keyword or location). Be sure to provide filtering options for as many variables as possible, and as with job titles, make sure that any job categories are clear and easy to understand for users. This might mean adapting them on your career site to be more suitable for an external audience.
   
4. Don’t use abbreviations, internal language or uncommon acronyms. This goes for job descriptions as well within the job titles.  
   
5. Use recruitment-specific programmatic job advertising technology that has the capability to dynamically optimize your job titles to ensure you get the best conversions from each job board you publish sponsored jobs to.