Growth Ninjas and Marketing Rock Stars and Brand Warriors, oh my!

Job titles are getting stranger. Here are a few gems.

Job titles can be… confusing. 

Growth Ninjas and Marketing Rock Stars and Brand Warriors, oh my!

What exactly is the difference between the Senior Experience Management Specialist and the Executive Vice President of Experience Management? Hard to say. 

Often, identical job titles can mean wildly different things at different companies. As The New York Times wrote last week, the title of “Chief of Staff,” which seems to crop up everywhere, “can mean almost anything.”

But let’s be honest with ourselves: A title like “Chief of Staff” is hardly the strangest thing you’ll find in the dystopian bouillabaisse that is LinkedIn’s job section.

So today, we’re rounding up some of the strangest job titles the internet has to offer… and trying our best to make sense of them.

But first… why did businesses start looking for Wizards + Gurus?

Companies started posting jobs for Ninjas, Wizards, and Rock Stars over the past few years in order to stand out from other employers in tight labor markets –– and make it clear to applicants that they care about “culture.”

And despite indications that overly creative job titles are NOT an effective way to recruit top talent, the practice of posting bizarre job titles has continued. 

According to the employment search engine Indeed.com, the number of job titles containing the word “Ninja” increased 140% between 2015 and 2018. 

Last year, Ninja took the top spot as the most popular weird job title, followed by Rockstar, Genius, Guru, Hero, Wizard, and Superhero. But that’s just the beginning.

Here are some of the strangest job titles we found in the wild…

Followed by our best plain-English attempts to decipher what the jobs actually entail. Buckle up, rock stars:

  • Inbound Shaman: AKA “digital marketer” (post)
  • IT Prodigy: AKA “IT technician” (post)
  • Brand Champion: AKA “PR strategist” (post)
  • Phone Whisperer: AKA “cold caller” (post)
  • Superhero: AKA “employee” (post)
  • Jedi Knight: AKA “product manager” (post)
  • Warehouse Warrior: AKA “physical laborer” (post)
  • Sales Wizard: AKA salesperson” (post)
  • Machine Learning Evangelist: AKA brand marketer” (post
  • FPGA Guru / HDL Gunslinger: AKA programmer” (post) (From the post: “MS or PhD preferred… Extraneous interests in exotic plants, jet engines and curing meats would be kismet.”)
  • Squire: AKA… Oh, wait a minute, this was actually posted by Medieval Times. Umm, never mind on this one (post)

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