When you look for job postings, do you look for alternate (or what I’ve referred to as adjacent) job titles?
You should. Here’s a post from job board watchdog Chris Russell: Indeed’s own job descriptions offer glimpse into keyword strategy. It’s not hard for an employer to put alternate titles into a job posting… but I’m guessing they don’t because (a) they haven’t thought of it, or (b) they are worried about the implications of someone applying to a job and wanting one of the alternate titles. Who knows.
Here’s what I do know: when you go a little beyond the titles you think you want, you just might learn about titles that you didn’t know about. That was the case for me, 10 years ago, when I searched for project manager jobs, and I came across the perfect title for me: product manager. I honestly had never heard of it before, even though I was already doing product manager tasks.
Expand your search a bit and be open to other titles. You might be delighted with what you come up with 🙂
Great advice – while I didn’t usually search on title, as the jobs I was seeking go by many titles depending on whether they are client or vendor side, I played around with keywords (without a geographic filter) to discover which combination yielded the most relevant postings. It remember discovering that the word “insight” was really key to getting the results I wanted. (Insert warning here that searching postings is not the only or best path to employment.)
Thanks Cleo…. great idea to take off the geo filter. I agree that applying to job postings is not the necessarily the best path, using job postings for intelligence is a great tactic.