How to Do Executive Job Title Research

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Often, especially when sourcing for executives, we need to answer questions like these):

What are possible job titles at a particular level of seniority, in a given industry (or at a company), with given functions?

Equipped with this intelligence, we can start constructing filtered people searches. Without this research upfront, we would be encountering both false positives and false negatives when searching.

While doing open-ended searches (on LinkedIn, for example) and eyeballing results is useful, at times, we want to get lists of job titles that are as full as possible. For that, we can X-Ray some sites with profiles, such as Zoominfo, and scrape search results with a tool like Instant Data Scraper. In X-Rays, we’d include keywords for job titles we are looking for, such as chief, head, director, senior vice president, etc.

For example, we can search like this:

site:zoominfo.com/p intitle:accenture “* director”

and scrape results. We will need to clean up the collected data a little, but we can get a reasonably full list of job titles, that include the word director, at Accenture. Note that if we are able to get Google to highlight the exact job titles in the results (for example, by searching for “chief * officer”), we would get a clean output of the titles in a separate column with Instant Data Scraper.

The contact-finding site contactout.com has public profiles and we can X-Ray it in the same manner (then, scrape results):

site:contactout.com intitle:”credit suisse” director “united arab emirates”.

Yet another site, RocketReach, can be used for the same:

site:rocketreach.co intitle:walmart intitle:chief “chief * officer”.

As an example output, here are the titles of Chief Officers at Walmart found with the above string:

Chief Administrative Officer
Chief Business Development Officer
Chief Communications Officer
Chief Compliance officer
Chief Culture Diversity&Inclusion Officer
Chief Customer Officer
Chief Data Officer
Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer
Chief Ethics Compliance Officer
Chief Ethics Officer
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Chief Information Officer
Chief Information Security Officer
Chief Legal Compliance Officer
Chief Marketing Officer
Chief Merchandising Officer
Chief People Officer
Chief Procurement Officer
Chief Product Officer
Chief Revenue Officer
Chief Technical Officer
Chief Technology Officer

Sure enough, we can also X-Ray LinkedIn for the same purpose. Constructing searches is straightforward since public LinkedIn profiles have both job titles and company names in the page titles.

We can get a combined job title list from each of these types of X-Ray searches, and this would inform our people searches.

Join me for a brand-new webinar Executive Sourcing Techniques on Tuesday, September 17th to learn more!

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