Job description best practices based on hiring data
Aug 29, 2017
The way you roll out new technology and services to your employees depends a lot on the size of your company. I noticed this immediately after leaving a 5,000+ person company to work at Textio as employee number 20. Things were faster, to say the least.
So I totally get why the sales and customer success teams hear these questions all the time at Textio:
- How should my company roll out Textio?
- How can I help my team adopt Textio?
The answer? It depends on your company! What works for Company A may not work for Company B’s size, workflow, or existing processes. Since every company is different, there’s no one-size-fits-all rollout plan.
That’s where I come in. Textio’s customer success team is pro at sniffing out your unique needs and helping you craft a rollout plan based on what we’ve seen succeed. In this article I’ll share tips from previous Textio rollouts along with data that shows which strategies work. Let’s get started.
1. Just do it.
Every job listing that gets posted without going through Textio is a wasted opportunity. When you have 10 million+ new job listings analyzed monthly, along with learnings from how they perform at your fingertips, why would you not use it for every role??!
It’s like rolling the dice — sure, you could get lucky and guess that using the phrase “make change” will help you fill a role faster in Seattle. But you’re not a computer, so you probably won’t reach that level of granularity and accuracy when guessing the impact of your words.
The #1 way to make sure this doesn’t happen? Get as many people using Textio as soon as possible. Few customers capture this better than Clarifai, an early-stage machine learning company and Textio customer.
When Clarifai first signed up for Textio they had about 30 employees according to Alex Rose, Clarifai’s recruiting lead. It was so easy to get started that Alex led her company’s own rollout:
“We had each person, not only just hiring managers, but other people who were interested, sign up for an account, and start writing job descriptions, even for roles that we may not have even had open at the time.”
When an account kicks off, Textio provides you with a quickstart guide that you can send to your team to help them get started. Not like they’ll need it — Textio is pretty intuitive. So intuitive, in fact, that Alex set a goal for every document her company posts:
“It just needs to be 100, and I’m not going to post it until it is.”
“Nothing [else] really teaches the people that are using it how to develop their language over time, which I thought was one of the most valuable things… Working at a company that signed the Tech Inclusion pledge, I wanted to make sure that we were actually championing that, and actually walking the walk, not just talking the talk.”
The best part? It still only takes them 13 minutes on average to bring their job listings to this high score.
2. Know your power-users
Leaning in to your rollout is always ideal, and it’s definitely easier for small companies with more fluid processes. As your company grows, the best rollouts don’t come from Textio — believe it or not, they come from within your team.
For some teams, an onboarding session (that’s a 45 minute live demo where we recommend the best workflows for editing and collaboration) is a great complement to the quickstart guide, and the customer success team is more than happy to help.
Think of the people who will be your biggest Textio champions. Maybe it’s your recruiting team, or your high-volume hiring managers. Maybe it’s that special soul that raises their hand for every writing assignment you can throw their way.
Here’s what happened when Expedia took this approach with their global recruiting team and hiring managers:
- Step 1: Expedia let all future users know about Textio so that they could sign up and start using it
- Step 2: Expedia hosted an onboarding for their global recruiting team. This is the group that would be working the closest with their job posts and could facilitate the future rollout to hiring managers.
- Step 3: By the time the onboarding session for Expedia’s hiring managers came around, there’s only a small increase in new users on the actual day. Most people had already been in and using Textio before the session we hosted.
The result? Almost 700 total Expedia users created an account within just a month of rolling out Textio. Kudos to you, Expedia!
So what can you learn from this? Know your power-users. Regardless of what you call them (we hear “ambassadors” pretty often) these folks will be your best bet for a smooth rollout. No one can help navigate your company’s workflow for new users better than the people within your company.
3. Textio is a necessity. Treat it like one.
Ever heard of little company called Johnson & Johnson? I kid. A company with around 250 subsidiaries and +120K employees does a LOT of hiring.
At this scale, it takes time to roll out new technology. That’s why J&J made Textio a required training before the first step of its rollout to the Talent & Acquisition team.
For J&J, that meant developing an on-demand video and training module that lived on their employee education site. The thing to learn from here, regardless of your size, is that Textio works best when:
- You build in Textio directly to employee onboarding and continuing education processes so that everyone gets access as part of their normal workflow.
- You store all of your Textio resources in a central location so that they’re visible, accessible, and top-of-mind for your entire team.
The result?
90% of all T&A team members have taken the Textio training, with 192 accounts created in the first two weeks alone. And we’re only just getting started!
One thing to keep in mind — outside of company size, the right way to roll out a new technology depends a lot on the technology itself. Textio is easy enough to use that you don’t need to sweat the small stuff.
