Thesaurus of Job Titles

An open source thesaurus of job titles in US English

This thesaurus is not perfect, but I hope it is a good start.

There is a disconnect between how people search for jobs and how those jobs are posted. People search for internships, but jobs are posted for interns. This is the synonym problem. It has a solution - a thesaurus.

For Job Seekers and Recruiters

First things first, you can check out my site www.EnlightenJobs.com for an online version of the thesaurus.

If you are here for the data, the files you are probably looking for are the assigned_role.txt and the job_title_dictionary.txt.

• assigned_role.txt - contains my list of detailed occupations along with an abbreviated list of synonyms and searches.
• job_title_dictionary - contains my list of words and phrases found in job titles.

For Developers, ATS's and Search Engines

For search engines, I built a synonyms file for Elasticsearch. Check the Elasticsearch folder for a demonstration.

• synonym_job_titles_for_index.txt - a file that should be used when indexing job titles in Elasticsearch.
• synonym_job_titles_for_search.txt - a file that could be used to run a search against the index in Elasticsearch.
• synonym_job_titles_for_search_alternative.txt - a file that could be used to run a more resource-intensive search against the index in Elasticsearch.

Under the Developers folder, I publish the thesaurus as a database in a MySql format.

I developed a job title generator that analyzes a job title, matches it to an Assigned Role, and suggests a better job title and keywords, if applicable. Check out the Developers subfolder for more information.

About the Thesaurus of Job Titles

Mission - Reduce frictional unemployment

Strategy - Improve the information flowing between recruiters and job seekers. Improve how recruiters and job seekers create job postings and resumes/online profiles. Improve how recruiters and job seekers search for candidates and jobs.

Economics says that search frictions, such as imperfect information, create frictional unemployment. Information retrieval says that information provided in search results can be improved with a thesaurus. Despite this, some of the most well known job and candidate search engines have not implemented a thesaurus.

Let's create a thesaurus of job titles and a few tools to make it easy to use. Hopefully, we can reduce unemployment in the long-term.

A Note about Copyright

The list of synonyms cannot be copyrighted. Check out Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. for more information.

The programming code in this project will be covered under GPLv3.