On Job Titles and Key Words
How adjusting a word can improve your results
Let’s say you’re an HR Manager on the hunt for your next job.
You pop onto a job board and search for “HR Manager” in a commutable distance from home.
Yet, while this will undoubtedly pick up results, the results are reliant on two things:
What a hiring process has called their vacancy
How that job board links your search to related jobs
On this second point, unless a job board uses somewhat of a thesaurus, your search may not bring up every suitable opportunity.
What else might an HR Manager be called?
When I’m recruiting for such a role, I regularly see suitable candidates whose job titles are:
Human Resources Manager
Head of HR
Personnel Director (one in a smaller company might suit a Manager vacancy in a larger company)
People Experience Lead
AD, Human Resources
Assistant Senior Assistant HR Business Partner (this is a genuine NHS job title)
Senior HR Generalist
Advisor, Adviser
Geographical differences too - what might a US business call a UK satellite role?
Conversely, were one of those people to get a job, and their company recruited a replacement, those are what might be advertised.
Such is the variety of job titles, sometimes it’s better to focus on skills and qualifications associated with those roles. Suchas CIPD, MCIPD, FCIPD.
If not HR, how about this doozy of a Marketing Manager, “Growth Strategy Leader”.
You wouldn’t necessarily think to search on that title, while that employer will probably be disappointed in the quality of their applications.
I’m not sure how I’d respond if a Growth Strategy Leader applied to a Marketing Manager mandate of mine - I’d hope to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Or how about Accountancy? CIMA, ACA, ACCA, GAAP, QBE might all relate to suitable vacancies, together with all their variations.
COO, Chief Operating Officer, Operations Director
How about continuous improvement?
Seemingly different terms like PDCA, Six Sigma, 6 Sigma, CI might produce viable results.
You may have picked up that I talk about recruiting different job titles in the same breath of as looking for the same job title.
This is because a job search is an inverse recruitment exercise, and vice versa.
It goes to follow, a good step in your job search is to form a list of every job title, qualification and skill that relates to vacancies you can demonstrably fulfil.
So how do you build out this list of job titles to search against, and how else might the same benefit you?
Use ChatGPT / Gemini or other LLM. Key in the skills, qualifications or job titles you that show your candidacy. Ask for comparable terms and double check with your own research.
Look at your real life network of peers, or contacts on LinkedIn. How do they describe themselves?
Every time you come across a new term, take note of it, then build them into your searches. These may be marginal gains, but if you find the one job others haven’t been able to find - your odds immediately improve.
Commonly you can filter by industry or job function on a job board, but you’d be surprised how often things are miscategorised, and you can make these errors work for you.
This is broadly how I headhunt using LinkedIn recruiters, in looking for candidates rather than jobs.
So if you know this is how a recruiter might look for a candidate, take advantage of this by using terminology for the roles you want to be found for in your CV and LinkedIn profile (and other arenas in which recruiters look).
The same principle that works for outbound job searching works for inbound leads, with one key difference: credibility.
When it comes to your CV and Profile, what you don’t want to do is pop the credibility bubble by being overly clever with how you present your experience.
Write for the human reader. Help them find you, then use your content credibly to encourage contact.
Don’t use ‘hacks’ like bombing every permutation of a related skill, title or qualification in white text, font size .1 at the foot of your CV.
There’s a lot to look at in your own individual job search, but these principles are both relatively simple and broadly effective in every job search.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg