Using STAND OUT Job Titles in Your Job Board Advertising

Yesterday I blogged about some of the more "interesting" job titles people have referenced on their linkedin profiles.

Some searching this morning showed me there are some people looking for Ninja’s to join their team. This appears to be an attempt by start-up web companies to make their vacancies more “sexy”. The search results below from a major job board aggregator show that these unconventional titles may not be the most prevalent, but are definitely being used:

Indeed UK – 2 results for Whiz

Indeed UK –0 results for Ninja, but 82 in the US

Indeed UK – 5 results for fanatic

Indeed UK – 98 results for guru

Indeed UK –609 results for expert

(Expert's not really that wacky, but it helps put the numbers into perspective)

You're probably wondering now whether that last position you advertised could have benefited from a more "individual" title. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of this approach. On the positive side your advert is definitely going to stand out from the crowd, and an emotive title like "Javascript Ninja" is just the thing to get potential candidates excited, you could have the most boring position in the world ready to be filled, but who's not going to get at least a little excited when you tell them they're going to be a ninja!

As far as down sides go, you will be very poorly optimised for applicants searching for alternative traditional job titles such as “JavaScript developer”. However, people searching for just the JavaScript stand a good chance of seeing your role. Clearly no one is going to search for “JavaScript ninja”, as demonstrated by a couple of quick keyword searches using Google's keyword tool.

A search on Google Keywords tool (a great way to find out what people are searching for), and none of the following were showing a result:

"ninja jobs"
"geek jobs"
"guru jobs"
"expert jobs"
"fanatic jobs"
"ninja jobs"
"whiz jobs"

For niche searches google just reports that there was not enough searches by UK users in the last month to warrant displaying the result.

I'd advise a certain level of care be taken not to adversely effect the search functionality of your advert. Clearly there are candidates out there who consider themselves a fit for these descriptions, but they're never going to be in the majority and there is no guarantee they'll automatically be the cream of the crop.

In tomorrow's blog I'll take a look at the recent changes Easy Web have made to take advantage of these interesting job titles without harming our core search functionality. I'll also walk through how we strike a balance between attractive copy and search optimisation.