Have you ever looked at a job listing and not been able to figure out exactly what the job is based on its title? Labor market data firm Emsi says it has a way to clear up any confusion, one that will help both jobseekers and the employers looking to hire them.
The company this morning unveiled Emsi Open Titles, an open-source library that allows employers to compare their job positions to broader labor market trends. The library maps companies’ internal job titles to the correct SOC and O*NET occupations, as defined by the U.S. Labor Department.
“Job titles can get weird and out of control,” says Andrew Crapuchettes, CEO of Emsi. It is so bad, he says, he “once talked to a company that had 9,000 employees and 7,000 job titles.”
“For employers in particular, the hiring process is often tough and inefficient, so we created Emsi Open Titles to help companies clean up their job title mess and gain better insight when they search for new candidates or evaluate the talent within their own four walls,” says Crapuchettes.
Clearing Up the Confusion
Last summer, prior to today’s launch, Emsi shared Open Titles with its own customer base to get feedback. Customers asked for more detail around the occupation titles.
The result: The library analyzes more than 20 million real world jobs and breaks them down into 75,000 standardized job titles. The list will be updated every two weeks.
Each of the 75,000 titles has its own webpage that offers insights about how that title is appearing in employer job descriptions, as well as the top skills associated with that occupation and salary trends.
Connecting Jobseekers and Employers
Emsi Open Titles has already gotten support from leaders in the workforce development community.
“While many companies want the ability to differentiate their positions and opportunities with creative names and descriptions, it helps to have a shared approach for how we title them so we know which jobs are roughly comparable and which are different.” That statement comes from Jason Tyszko, VP of the Center of Education and Workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
“Employers should ensure a job title clearly defines the role they are hiring for and is aligned with the skills-based interview questions and assessments. Emsi’s work to promote alignment across job titles is very promising in creating more transparency for jobseekers,” Shannon Block, executive director of Skillful Colorado at Markle, says in a statement.
