The file is being read as a bunch of strs, but it should be unicodes. Python tries to implicitly convert, but fails. Change:
job_titles = [line.strip() for line in title_file.readlines()]
to explicitly decode the strs to unicode (here assuming UTF-8):
job_titles = [line.decode('utf-8').strip() for line in title_file.readlines()]
It could also be solved by importing the codecs module and using codecs.open rather than the built-in open.