February 3, 2021 by Haley Yamane Melhart
In a world where there are multiple job titles for (relatively) the same position, things can get chaotic quickly. What one company calls a “product specialist” might be a “product analyst” (or the more quirky “product ninja”) to another. Unique job titles are great, but given the wildly diverse terminology, they can complicate how companies advertise open positions, compare their skills to industry benchmarks, and track employee skills (and skills gaps).
To normalize job titles is to capture the chaos.
Job title normalization is the process of translating your internal language to the outside world. When your titles are normalized, they become the most relevant, utilized terminology across the industry—giving your team the clearest lens for role analysis.
Emsi hosts the most comprehensive library of titles built from and connected to our entire data ecosystem.
We continuously collect and analyze millions of titles from job postings, resumes, and profile data. This collection allows us to compare job title trends, commonalities, and outliers across individual industries and determine what the normalized job title would be for any given role.
Simply put, Emsi Titles reflect what jobs are actually called, because they are based on real job titles.
Normalization includes government taxonomies like Standard Occupation Codes (SOC) and O*NET. If you want to benchmark your roles against government data, one of these codes must be present in your titles.
That’s where we come in.
Emsi’s aggregate posting and profile data is tagged with SOC and O*NET codes, so we can associate the most common codes to job titles (and vice versa), giving you comprehensive information for your own role analysis.
The best part?
By normalizing your job titles, you don’t actually have to change them. That’s right. You can keep your retail wizards, digital overlords, and marketing rockstars as is—Emsi simply associates a tag (translation layer) with each job title so that you still get the optimized reports and up-to-date information moving forward.
Normalized job titles help all kinds of talent analytics strategies and goals. Here are some examples:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Talent Mobility
Skills Strategy
Talent Acquisition
Workforce Planning
Let’s say you work in HR and have been tasked with hiring a “marketing director.” You have the most recently-used job description in hand and are about to share it with the world.
But wait!
How do you know that “marketing director ” is the most accurate representation of the role? Have the salary expectations for that title changed since you last advertised for it? How are your competitors advertising for similar roles?
This is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of insights provided by job title normalization so that you can get answers to those burning questions.
Continuing with this example, let’s say you do analyze the information provided from the job title normalization process and gain the following takeaways:
Just like that, you’ve optimized your talent-seeking process by:
Normalizing your titles helps you identify areas for improvement and plan for the future. That’s what role analysis is all about. The possibilities are endless and partner opportunities can take this process even further for people analytics.