How to tell where you should work

One of the most important decisions you make is where you work. You spend a huge part of your life surrounded by the people and environment of your workplace.

Does your work stimulate or bore you? Do your coworkers feel like family or foes? Are you growing or wilting? Does your day go by quickly or feel like forever? Is your work environment supporting your life goals or is it just a place to punch in and get a paycheck?

It turns out there’s a way to screen for all of these questions before you ever even apply for a job: pay attention to a company’s job listings.

Job listings speak volumes

The job listing is the first, most important, and most predictive way to tell what a company is like to work for. The companies that post jobs that are meaningfully better than their competition are also the ones who take the time to create a culture and environment that makes them a great place to work.

The words employers use matter deeply; those who use compelling and thoughtful language are also mostly compelling and thoughtful places to work. These go hand in hand. Language is the way humans communicate: an organization that can explain clearly why you would want to spend your valuable time working there should be a prerequisite to you actually spending valuable time applying for a job there.

Data reveals the connection

This isn’t just a theory — it turns out, when you model the data empirically, certain companies do a drastically better job at attracting and keeping great people.

And machine intelligence (essentially deep, layered, complex computer models) can predict these companies very accurately from just the language in their public job listings. This is Textio’s business; we provide the platform employers use to express the potential of their company through writing.

For months, people ready to explore new jobs have written to us asking if we could build something that would help them identify which companies they should apply to (and, perhaps, which to be more skeptical of).

We heard you.

A little something to help you out

We’ve put together a little something to help you out: the Textio Index. You can go to textio.com and search for any company (they must have published at least 20 public job listings in English). You’ll find out the company’s Textio Score, and how that company’s score ranks compared to its competitors.

How does it work? Well, the Textio predictive engine is based on data from over 50 million job listings with outcomes data.

From these listings, our learning models consider multitude of different types of data — for instance: How long did the job stay open? How qualified were the people who applied? How many people applied? How well did applicants do in interviews? What were the demographics of the people who applied?

And then all of this is modeled against the words, phrases, content, and structure of the source job listing to create models that predict very accurately how well a job listing will perform and who will apply for the job, before it is even posted.

For the first time, we’ve brought the same advanced technology great employers use — Textio’s predictive engine and massive data outcomes store — to help you discover the best workplace to realize your potential.

Curious to see the rankings?

Check the Textio Index ranking and detailed stats for as many companies as you want right from our home page. It’s totally free, and we don’t expect anything in return.

This data is always live and always changing, so check back often. Recruiting is a competitive space and companies are hard at work competing for your talent.

You deserve a great place to work; we hope this makes starting your search a little bit easier.