Job description best practices based on hiring data
Nov 28, 2017
“It usually takes a lot of time to see if HR tools are working. You tweak something in your recruiting process and wait to see the results. With Textio, we saw results right away,” says Michelle Wagner, the SVP of People at Evernote. With 20 years of tech industry and recruiting experience, she’s used to seeing technologies come and go.
But Textio had such an immediate impact that Evernote wasn’t the only one to take notice. Evernote had such an extreme uptick in their applications coming through Glassdoor that they called to ask Michelle: “What did you just change?!”
When Michelle joined Evernote nearly two years ago, she wanted the company to grow thoughtfully, with a focus on building a diverse team. Evernote is a growing startup that allows you to capture, organize, and share notes from anywhere. Michelle didn’t want Evernote to fall into the monoculture trap that hits many mid-stage startups. So, as part of achieving her big goals, she added Textio to the team’s toolbelt.
A few months into using Textio, 60% of Evernote’s job posts reached a Textio Score of 90+. Which means Evernote’s job listings will fill faster than 90% of similar listings. One result of these high scoring listings: Evernote’s click-to-apply rate on Glassdoor had more than doubled.
Evernote has maintained its high Textio Score with an average today of 88, and the company not only sees more candidates, but these candidates are more qualified for the roles they’re posting.
- 5% more people pass the initial application review
- 7% more are qualified enough to pass the recruiter phone screen
- 6% more are qualified enough to pass hiring manager review
A high Textio Score is great, but back to one of Michelle’s initial goals: “We are getting more and more candidates, but are we getting more qualified and diverse groups to apply?“ Over the course of three months, Evernote’s applicants that identified as underrepresented minorities went from 8% to 10%. “While these might feel like small jumps, these are actually huge changes at Evernote’s size,” Michelle says.
Evernote also looked at the ratio of men to women applying and they found that over the same three-month period their women applicants jumped from 31% to 40%.
So, what can you learn from Evernote and Michelle? She recommends turning job post writing into a team sport. If that doesn’t sound easy to you, you’re not alone — at the beginning, Michelle faced resistance from hiring managers at Evernote. But at a tech-centric company, even hiring managers couldn’t ignore the data behind Textio. “This is not a platform purely for recruiters. Our hiring managers have a lot of fun with Textio, exploring the algorithms behind the scenes and seeing how changing the location or industry changes the way their language will perform,” Michelle added.
Evernote has also seen the value of Textio beyond job postings. “Recently, I wrote one sourcing mail in Textio and I got so many responses! One person replied and said, ‘this is the best crafted email I’ve ever received — regardless of how I feel about the role, I just wanted to let you know.“
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in HR for one or 20 years — you probably know responses like those don’t happen often. Whether it’s data from Michelle’s recruiting mail or data from Textio’s 10 million monthly job listings, the truth is the same — the data doesn’t lie! And Textio can help bring your recruiting data alive to improve applicant matching and diverse hiring — just as it has with Evernote!
