Selecting the right job title for your recruitment advertisement is extremely beneficial for attracting the right talent. The job title is the first thing a candidate looks at to determine whether they’ll engage with your job ad and find out more about your role. Here, we provide some essential practices you can follow when crafting a great job title.

Why are Job Titles Important?

You may think it’s easy to come up with a job title, but the truth is you should do research and make sure the phrases you use are standard across the industry you’re hiring for. According to a 2020 survey by Indeed, 36% of job seekers that use job sites search for a job using the title of the job they’re looking for.

Additionally, an excellent job title will:

• Invite skilled candidates to apply for your open role

• Quickly identify job responsibilities and duties for the candidate

• Clearly describe the experience level required

• Align with an organization’s expectations and priorities

Job Title Best Practices

Before you create a job title, think like a job seeker and put yourself in their shoes to get a snapshot of what they could be searching for. A well-crafted job title should be easy to find when you’re searching on a job board. So, use searchable keywords based on internal and external data.

• Job titles should include three to five words at maximum (roughly 35 to 60 characters with spaces.) This allows candidates to quickly identify a skill they’re qualified to do.

• Use industry-standard phrases and remove any company jargon or catchy words. For example, you don’t want to use Level 3 Programmer or Rock Star Data Specialist. You’d want to use Senior Programmer or Data Specialist. This offers insight into the skill level and responsibilities of the open role.

Job Titles Should Fit Your Organizational Chart

Aligning your job titles with the organizational chart will help your recruiting efforts and accurately represents the role and department. It will help define where the role correlates within the hierarchy and it can be used to optimize the job titles and their descriptions in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Human Resources Information System (HRIS).

Some Things to Avoid

As a rule of thumb, if you put something in the job title that isn’t going to help job seekers find your posting, don’t include it.

• Stay away from using numbers, abbreviations, and acronyms in your job titles. They can be confusing to a candidate and aren’t necessarily defined the same way in every organization.

• Remove any special characters from your listing. They can display incorrectly on job boards or search engines such as Google –making your organization look unprofessional.

• Don’t add a location to your job title. There is a place for that in the job description.

The Right Title Can Go Far

When it comes to job titles, a well-crafted one is critical for attracting talent. The title can be viewed as the start of a candidate’s career path. It can positively influence the outcome of recruitment efforts by saving time, receiving more applications, and accurately defining the hierarchy throughout the organization. By making your job titles short, succinct, and searchable, you’ll be able to find the right candidates more effectively.