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Describe the role in plain language. The match runs against a canonical form of every person’s title, so wording, seniority phrasing, abbreviations, and other languages all resolve to the same underlying job.
Job title is person-grain. It works on Contact Search only — sending one to a company endpoint returns a 422 pointing you back here.

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Why not a list of titles?

Because the list is never finished. One buyer persona is spelled a dozen ways across a dozen companies, and every in list you write is a guess at which dozen: A contains filter on "marketing" catches Marketing Interns and misses Heads of Growth. One SmartSearch node catches the role and skips the intern, because it matches what the title means.

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Control how close a match must be

Two ways to do it. Pick one — sending both match and maxDistance is a 422.

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Option 1 — a named preset

Send match with one of four names. Each is a similarity floor calibrated for job titles specifically. On target is the measured share of matches at that stop that genuinely hold the role, from a study over a 2,452-pair judged benchmark. Presets are cumulative — broad returns everything related would, plus a looser band beneath it.

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Option 2 — your own similarity threshold

Send maxDistance instead and put the floor wherever you like:
An 80% similarity floor is "maxDistance": 0.20. A raw maxDistance means exactly what it says and skips our calibration. To find your own number, preview with "includeScores": true and read _titleSimilarity on each row — they come back best-match first. Scroll to where results stop being useful and set your floor just above that.
Title distances are clamped at 0.30 (a 70% floor). Sending a looser maxDistance is accepted and then run at 0.30, so broad sits on that real ceiling rather than below it.

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If you send neither

You get similar — an 85% similarity floor. Sending nothing is exactly the same search as sending "match": "similar", down to the same rows.
"match": "same" is accepted as a legacy alias for similar on job title filters only. It predates the shared vocabulary. Use similar in new code.
Job title is the most accurate of the three SmartSearch targets at every stop. Even broad is 73% on target, which makes it genuinely usable for list building in a way that broad on the other two targets is not. Start at similar. Move outward when the count is too small; tighten to exact when a preview shows roles you didn’t intend.

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One role per node

This is the single most common mistake. The matcher reduces a node’s whole text to one standard job title before matching, so a comma list of different roles silently collapses into just one of them. Wrong — matches only CMOs:
Right — give each distinct role its own node and join with OR:
Up to three job title nodes per filter. If you need more roles than that, merge the ones closest in seniority and function.

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Examples

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Pair it with seniority

SmartSearch finds the function; JOB_LEVEL_PER pins the seniority. Together they’re sharper than either alone:
Widening the SmartSearch to related while pinning the level is often better than tightening the SmartSearch: you catch more phrasings of the role without catching juniors.

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Next steps