Finding a common language

At many companies there is often a communication gap between the hiring manager who has an open requisition and the recruiters and sourcers who have to help that hiring manager fill the role.

J&J has been partnering with Textio for years. In June 2017, Textio was rolled out to the recruiters on J&J’s talent and acquisition team, who were tasked with bringing their job descriptions up to speed and to communicate those changes to the hiring managers. Over time, however, the recruiters noticed a widening communications divide between themselves and the hiring managers, who didn’t use Textio. Textio was challenging the way that J&J thought about language.

The J&J team has written nearly 4,000 job posts with Textio, which has given the team a deep knowledge and understanding of the data behind J&J’s hiring language. On average, J&J’s recruiters improve their Textio Scores by more than 20 points for each job post. But Textio helped surface that there was still a disconnect with hiring managers who weren’t seeing the impact of this new hiring language day in and day out. Take the term “stakeholder,” for example. Used by hiring managers out of habit, Textio’s data showed that when this word was used in J&J’s job posts, they wouldn’t perform as well.

Another example comes from Irene Nicastro, a Senior Recruiter & Talent Acquisition Leader working in J&J’s pharmaceuticals sector. She surmised that hiring managers in the pharmaceutical industry are traditionally “very wordy” with their job descriptions. Many hiring managers were resistant to making data-backed changes. “I’d cut it out, and they would add it back in.”

To fix this, J&J, a company of over 100,000 employees, decided to give its hiring managers access to the Textio platform. The goal: give J&J hiring managers tangible data on how the words they choose change how J&J shows up in the hiring market.

The impact of this decision was immediate: Textio made space for more collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters — and ultimately helped J&J write job descriptions that would fill faster and attract more applicants.

Here are some lessons J&J learned:

1. Job posts shouldn’t be a chore!

Textio makes getting started easy. J&J recruiters agree that the hiring managers they bring on board found the Textio platform simple. The interactive highlights and intuitive interface made writing jobs more engaging.

2. Teamwork makes the dream work

Work together on Textio’s platform. Writing with the Textio platform means everyone is on the same page all the time… literally! When time is of the essence, the last thing J&J worries about is job post version control.

“Textio is a great starting point. They loved the back and forth. Within 30 minutes, we had traded back and forth, and landed on a job posting. In the past, it would take several days of trading emails to get to that point. It was in real time, which was awesome.” — Dalia Naami

When J&J added hiring managers to the Textio process, the motivation of teamwork was significant — documents shared in Textio scored significantly better than documents where team members didn’t seek a helping hand.

When J&J shared their documents, the average Textio score increased 41%. Job listings with a score of 90 or more jumped six-fold from 5% to 30%! The percent of J&J jobs that were very biased dropped from 11% to 3%, and job posts with a very masculine tone were completely eliminated.

3. Everyone should know their impact

Higher scores mean more people apply. J&J listings with a score of 90 see a 19% increase in the amount of people applying compared to low-scoring postings.

Higher scores attract more diverse applicants. When J&J’s job posts had a score of 80 or higher, there was a 22% increase in underrepresented candidates.

Neutral gender tone listings fill 8 days faster. When J&J’s posts are neutral in gender tone, they fill 15% faster than very biased listings that skew either very masculine or very feminine in tone.

Neutral gender tone attracts more qualified candidates. J&J job listings with a neutral gender tone see up to three times the number of candidates qualified enough to move up the hiring pipeline.

If your organization knew that teamwork with Textio was this easy, and you could clearly see the impact of your language, wouldn’t you hit share right now?

4. Recruiters are still the experts.

Textio isn’t meant to replace a recruiter’s intuition. Throughout J&J’s hiring manager rollout, hiring managers still required support from the experts — their T&A team. Textio’s collaboration features level the playing field so that both parties can come to the table with knowledge of the role, the industry, and the data to check their intuitions.

Jason Braaten, a Senior Sourcing Consultant for J&J Quality Engineering companies, led a quick onboarding for his hiring managers. The result: his hiring managers were able to improve their Textio scores independently, before Jason jumped in for final edits: “Typically, they could get it up to … [a Textio score of] 76.” And from an average initial draft score of 41, that’s a massive improvement.

When your recruiters and hiring managers use the Textio platform to work together to improve their job descriptions , everyone wins. When both teams see the live data that measures the impact of every word, and — in the process — save time, they can collaborate more effectively, and improve hiring outcomes all at the same time.

Now that’s language we can all get behind.