New Age Babel: Titles today can leave you tongue-tied. (Colorado Cutting Edge).

WHAT'S IN A JOB TITLE THESE DAYS? PLENTY more than just work responsibilities if the company is Boulder-based just Techjobs.com.

The company's officers and employees, who offer tech employers and job seekers a meeting place, themselves have some rather unusual job monikers. And that

Company co-founder and boss Russ Curtis, for example, officially goes by the title of "chief nerd" though he admits he functions as the CEO. And Rudy Lacovara, also a co-founder, is "chief geek." In mainstream circles that represents justTechjob's chief operating officer.

The Boulder company isn't alone in the move away from traditional job titles.

The practice, undertaken by some companies as a way to better describe job functions, as a conscious effort to define a unique corporate culture, or as bait to attract the attention of younger creative talent, is spreading fast.

So fast it may be hard to keep up.

T. Williams Consulting, a Collegeville, Pa.-based human resources company, offers a few of the more imaginative new titles:

* Chief enthusiasm officer: an obviously less than hardball chief executive.

* Chief evangelist: marketing and promotions manager.

* Chief imagination officer: creative director.

* Minister of dollars and sense: chief financial officer.

And the titles are no joke. Fred Hobbs, justTechjob's "marketing nerd," said his company's playful approach is calculated to appeal to the audience the company hopes to attract: programmers, network administrators and others involved in backend technologies.

"Our slogan is 'Nerds wanted,"' said Hobbs. "So we try and play it up. Everybody's title has nerd in it."

Nonetheless, not everyone is so upbeat toward non-mainstream job titles.

Wendy Enelow, Lynchburg, Va.-based site expert for Chief Monster, the executive-level product for career site Monster.com, says "chief geek" sounds like a techie locked in a cubicle with a laptop, rather than president of a successful company.

"You better be president and not chief nerd if you're on Wall Street," said Enelow. "Are you going to give $10 million to a chief nerd, or to the president?"

From a job seeker's point of view, mainstream titles also are important, especially in this age of keyword resume searches. Chief evangelist, for example, sounds like a church-related activity, Enelow says, and it shouldn't be on a resume unless it refers to something religious. Other job-title suggestions from Enelow:

* Employers need to decide what audience to target with a job posting. If it's the dot-coin community, minister of dollars and cents is apropos, but if the goal is to expand a candidate pool, chief financial officer is much more suitable.

* Job seekers with an unconventional job title need to translate it into an easily recognizable one. Employers recruiting new prospects often use automatic keyword searches that look for familiar words or phrases. An employer's search could easily skip over that brilliant marketing director who is posing as a chief evangelist.