Job title variations: how to search every name for your role

Job title variations exist because nobody is in charge of titles. Each employer names its own roles, and the name reflects that company's history and habits more than any shared standard.

You can see how loose it is in the way the United States government handles the problem. The Standard Occupational Classification, which federal agencies use to count jobs, does not classify by title at all: occupations are classified "based on work performed".^[3] To connect that system to the words people actually use, the Department of Labor's O*NET database keeps a file of alternate, or "lay", titles gathered from employer postings, associations, state agencies and users. In version 29.0 that file has 55,120 rows.^[1]

One occupation shows the pattern. For Software Developers, O*NET's sample of reported titles includes Application Developer, Developer, Software Development Engineer, Software Engineer, Software Architect, DevOps Engineer and Systems Engineer.^[2] If you search only one of those, you see only the employers who happened to choose it.

Yes, more than the rest of the posting in some ways. Two economists who studied postings and applications on a large job site found that job titles explain more than 90 percent of the variation in posted wages, and more than 80 percent of the variation in the education and experience of the people who apply.^[4]

In plain terms: the words in the title tell applicants what level and what kind of job it is, and applicants sort themselves accordingly. That cuts both ways for your search. The right title words find your jobs. One wrong word, such as a level above or below yours, fills your results with jobs you will not get or do not want.

Use four sources. Each catches names the others miss.

1. O*NET OnLine. Type your current title into the occupation search. The search matches your words against each occupation's alternate titles, description and tasks, and ranks the results.^[5] Open the best match and copy the sample of reported job titles. Then open the second and third matches, because your role may sit between two occupations.
2. Real postings. Find five postings that describe your actual work, whatever they are called. Write down each title exactly as written. Titles from the last few months beat anything on a list.
3. People who do your job. Look at what former colleagues and people with your background are called now at other companies. This is where new names show up first.
4. Employers you would like to work for. Read their careers pages and note what they call your team. Some companies use a house style you would never guess.

Stop when new sources stop adding names. For most roles that is somewhere between six and ten titles.

Most job sites take one phrase at a time, so the simple method is a saved list you run through in order. Keep it in a note:

The example titles are ours, for illustration. Build your own from the four sources above.

In a general web search you can tighten things with operators Google documents: put a title in quotes for an exact match, put a minus sign in front of a word to leave it out, and use site: to search one employer's domain.^[6] For example: "customer success associate" -senior site:example.com.

Some tools hold the list for you. Final Resume suggests searches from your resume and lets you edit the titles, keywords and skip-words, then keeps only postings whose titles match.

Skip-words do as much work as titles. Since title words signal level and pay,^[4] the most useful ones to exclude are usually level words that do not fit you: intern, junior, senior, principal, director, depending on where you are.

Three cautions:

• Do not skip too early. Levels are not standard either. One company's "senior" is another's ordinary role. If you are unsure, leave the word in for a week and see what it brings.
• Watch for words that hide inside other words. Skipping "intern" should not remove "internal".
• The same title can mean different jobs. The government classifies by work performed for a reason.^[3] Always read the first few duties before deciding a posting is or is not yours.

1. Write down your current title and the title you want next.
2. Search both on O*NET OnLine and copy the reported titles from the top matches.^[5][2]
3. Find five recent postings that fit your work and add their exact titles.
4. Cross out any title you would not accept. Add three to five skip-words.
5. Run every title on the list through your usual search once. Note which titles return real matches and which return nothing; drop the dead ones.
6. Save the list. Repeat steps 3 to 5 once a month, because the names keep changing.

The aim is not a longer search. It is to stop missing the employers who gave your job a name you did not think to type.