The Hidden Cost of Career Titles

If you search for "Systems Engineer" on any job board, you'll find roles that have almost nothing in common with each other.

One posting describes a cloud infrastructure role at a fintech company. Another describes a defense contractor position involving hardware specifications. A third is essentially a DevOps role with a different title.

Same title. Completely different jobs.

This isn't a quirk. It's one of the fundamental problems in career matching — and it's why keyword-based job search tools consistently fail.

What our data shows

Across Seeker's corpus of 160,000+ live job openings, we regularly observe titles that map to multiple, unrelated career domains:

"Systems Engineer" appears in:

• Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform)
• Defense and aerospace (hardware specs, compliance, DoD clearance)
• DevOps and SRE (CI/CD, monitoring, incident response)
• IT operations (Active Directory, networking, help desk escalation)

"Program Manager" appears in:

• Technical program management (engineering roadmaps, cross-team delivery)
• Marketing operations (campaign management, vendor coordination)
• Non-profit administration (grant management, community programs)
• Construction and logistics (project scheduling, compliance)

"Product Analyst" appears in:

• Data analytics (SQL, dashboards, A/B testing)
• Product management (roadmap support, user research)
• Business intelligence (reporting, KPI tracking)
• Financial analysis (modeling, forecasting)

Each of these titles shares a label but requires fundamentally different skills, experience, and career backgrounds.

Why keyword matching breaks

Traditional job search tools match your resume against job descriptions using keyword overlap. If your resume says "Systems Engineer" and a job posting says "Systems Engineer," it's a match.

But that match is meaningless if your Systems Engineer experience is in cloud infrastructure and the job posting is for defense hardware. The title matched. The career didn't.

This is why so many job seekers report seeing irrelevant results from ATS scanners and job boards. The tools aren't broken — they're just operating on a signal (the title) that doesn't carry enough information to make a good recommendation.

How Seeker handles this differently

Instead of matching titles, Seeker analyzes the actual content of your experience:

• What skills do you have?
• What domains have you worked in?
• What seniority level does your experience reflect?
• What adjacent career paths does your background support?

Then it compares that full profile against the actual requirements of each job — not just the title.

A cloud-focused Systems Engineer gets matched to infrastructure roles, SRE positions, and DevOps teams. A defense-focused Systems Engineer gets matched to technical program management, compliance roles, and aerospace engineering positions.

Same title. Different careers. Different matches.

The cost of title-based thinking

When job seekers define their search by title, they create two problems:

1. They miss roles they'd be great at because those roles have different titles
2. They apply to roles they won't get because the title matched but the domain didn't

Both problems waste time and erode confidence. After applying to thirty "Systems Engineer" roles and hearing back from three, it's natural to question your qualifications. But the issue isn't your experience — it's the search strategy.

The careers that fit your experience are out there. They might just have titles you've never searched for.

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Methodology

Observations in this article are based on analysis of Seeker's job corpus of 160,000+ live openings and patterns observed across 5,459 career analyses performed between May and June 2026. Title diversity statistics reflect aggregate classification trends. No personally identifiable information is included.