We are now living in a candidate-driven market where supply and demand are working to the candidate’s advantage. The talent gap we are experiencing makes it increasingly more difficult to fill developer positions. The expectations of employers and employers are not always the same. We have looked at the typical job searches developers are making and cross-examined them with the vocabulary companies are using.
The Most Frequent Words Found in Job Postings
As you would expect the top searched words were engineer, software, and developer. Close behind these three was the word developer. Not too far behind were front, end, back, full, stack, java, and data.
Also, with the words above, there were a number of combined searches. The most common search included combinations with software and engineer, and senior and engineer.
Then, there are geographical trends within the searches. For example, Full Stack Developer was most commonly searched for in North America, whereas Front End Developer and Back End Developer were most often searched for in Europe. The third-most-popular job title searched for in the UK was DevOps Engineer. Generally speaking, you are more likely to see people in the States searching for “engineer”, unlike in Germany, the UK, and Canada where they use “developer”.
Some of the most popular technologies mentioned in job listings are those such as Java, .NET, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Regarding roles, keywords included team leaders and engineering managers.
At the same time as looking at the most popular, we could also gain an understanding of those positions that are most difficult to fill, such as DevOps, Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering.
The Popularity of Key Words
A study was carried out on 180,000 search enquires between 2017 and 2018. It stated that 50% of all searches included 30 of the most searched terms. The top 10 words included:
- C#
- Python
- PHP
- Android
- iOS
- C++
- JavaScript
- QA
- .NET
- Junior
On the other hand, there are some keywords that came up in job postings that developers didn’t tend to search for. These included; system, web, manager, administrator, architect, application, cloud, analyst, automation, designer, security, mobile, UI, and IT. From this, we can gather that developers are more inclined to search for the technology and postings place more emphasis on roles.
Terms That Are Gaining or Losing Popularity In Developer Searches
Between January 2017 until the present, QA and React are the two terms that have gained the most popularity. Despite slight peaks, Ruby, Android, PHP, iOS, Java, and C# have steadily become less popular.
When looking from the other perspective, infrastructure, react, and site are the fastest-growing words appearing in job postings.
Some of the words that developers are looking for and companies are including are React, junior, and Python. Python is definitely a favourite with companies wanting to higher Python developers and developers looking to work with this language.
Popular and Unpopular Frameworks For Developers
React.js was the most popular framework. 74.5% of developers want to continue working with it. Vue.js came in second with 73.6%. JQuery is somewhat unloved with just 45.3%, and Drupal came in last with 30.1% of developers wishing to use it.
Maximising the Potential of Your Job Posting
By using the keywords that were highlighted in this article, you will be able to phrase your advert in order to attract the developers you seek. However, each company is different and will have different needs. Some of the best adverts are those that are created by a group of people including members from your HR and software development team. The most important thing is to keep it real. Nothing frustrates a developer more than job listings that don’t reflect the actual job.