• 4-minute read
• 12th November 2019

How to Write Perfect Job Titles

Job titles are important. They’re the first thing someone will see when looking for a job. And they can make a role more appealing, reflecting the status that comes with it. But what makes a good job title? And how should you write job titles? In this post, we look at two key issues:

1. How to create the perfect job title when advertising a role.
2. Whether to capitalise job titles when writing them in a document.

So for advice on creating professional job titles, check out the tips below.

3 Tips for Creating a Great Job Title

When advertising a job, the first thing candidates see is the job title. As such, it pays to spend a little time crafting job titles when you’re creating a listing. Try using these three tips next time you need to come up with a job title.

1. Do Some Keyword Research

To reach the best candidates, you need job listings to be easy to find. And the best way to do this is to use a clear job title that contains relevant keywords.

To get this right, try to think like a jobseeker, especially in terms of what people search for to find the kind of role you’re advertising. And look at the job titles other companies use for similar roles.

This may seem a bit dull to some people. After all, standard job titles may be a little mundane. But when advertising a job, searchability is the most important factor. And the simple fact is that more people will search for ‘Senior Proofreader’ than ‘Grammar Wizard’ when job hunting.

2. Be Specific

Job titles should be as specific as possible. For example, while ‘Baker’ could serve as a job title, there are many types of baker. And ‘Baker’ by itself does not tell us anything about the level of experience required for a role.

By contrast, ‘Junior Pastry Chef’ both tells us the exact role and provides some basic information on the experience level required. Likewise, if a job has specific conditions (e.g. part-time), you can include these in the job title.

3. Take Care with Abbreviations

As a rule, you should avoid abbreviations in job titles to increase searchability. For instance, writing ‘Sr’ instead of ‘Senior’ may make your listing harder to find. However, industry standard abbreviations (e.g. CRM) are usually fine, as people will search for these when seeking a related role.

Should Job Titles be Capitalised?

At Proofed, we get a lot of questions about whether to capitalise job titles. In job listings, CVs and resumes – where a title is typically given by itself – the answer is almost always ‘yes’. In these cases, you can basically treat job titles as if they were headings/subheadings in the document.

But when a job title appears in a sentence, the rules may be a little different.

One tip is to check your in-house style guide if your company has one, as this should explain everything you need to know about capitalising job titles (and capitalisation in general). If you don’t have a style sheet to work with, though, you will usually want to capitalise a job title when:

• It appears before a person’s name (e.g. Head of Sales Arjun Nair).
• You are using it in place of someone’s name (e.g. ‘Can you help, Doctor?’).

In most other cases, a job title will be more of a description of the role than a formal title, so you would not need to capitalise it. We can see a comparison of the two approaches below:

Head of Sales Arjun Nair will be leading the meeting.

Arjun Nair, who is head of sales, will be leading the meeting.

I’ve been seeing Doctor John Smith since January.

I’ve been seeing a doctor since January.

Hopefully, this has helped you understand how to write job titles in different situations. But if you need any more help with your writing, don’t forget we have editing experts available 24/7.