What’s In A Job Title?

If you’re looking for a new position, you’ll be searching online for positions that match the one you have been holding. You can usually choose from a drop-down menu of titles such as Vice President, Director, Manager, Co-ordinator, or Assistant, and various others. But what if the job you currently hold has a really weird title? How do you explain yourself?

These days, lots of companies want to show how different and off-beat they are. So they make up a whole lot of unusual job titles. What about Chief Ninja? That’s a real job title, you know. What’s the job seeker to do? Can you just cover things up a bit? Are job titles even that important?

Never lie

Even if you have an uncommon job title and recruiters are going to have a hard time finding you, never lie. A company that values integrity as one of its core values might decide to withdraw any job offer they have given you if they find out you have lied.

Instead, write your correct job title on your CV (e.g., Marketing Ninja), with a more common title in brackets afterwards (e.g., Marketing Co-ordinator). That way you will be helping with keyword searches, but your correct job title will have been clarified.

Tell them what you real function is

Job titles in themselves are fairly inadequate at explaining what someone does. The position of manager, vice president or ninja has little meaning without an explanation of the context. If you are the company’s Marketing Ninja, what do you actually do?

Are you in charge of client relations for the company? Are you the chief ‘people’ officer? Who and what are you really?

What you need is a kind of tagline or subtitle. This should explain the meaning of your job.

Take advantage of your unusual job title

If you have an unusual job title incorporating words such as ‘ninja’ or ‘guru,’ make the most of it. Use it to jazz up your covering letter, in which you should explain what the word means, and include more common keywords for search purposes. It could be a fun talking point for interviews.

Just for fun, here are some of the stranger job titles we’ve come across in the UK:

• Developer Evangelist: There’s nothing religious about this one. Someone in this role encourages the adoption of a certain piece of technology.
• Chief Cloud Architect: No, you don’t spend your time up in the air for this one. This person is an IT strategist and advisor who is the focal point for all technical aspects relating to the (IT) cloud.
• Sandwich Artist: This person isn’t necessarily a Michelangelo. He or she makes sandwiches at Subway.
• Listening Lead: This is quite a newbie on the job scene. Such a person uses social media monitoring to provide insights into campaigns for key stakeholders.
• Ramp Agent: No, this has got nothing to do with modelling. Instead, someone in this job guides planes into their gates and out again, as well as making sure that baggage and cargo are safely loaded and unloaded.