Job description best practices based on hiring data
Nov 10, 2021
In the era of "The Great Resignation," job candidates are placing a premium on companies with a culture of inclusion and belonging. The thousands of individual writing choices you and your teammates make in your public content combine to tell your organization's story—your employer brand. Having a compelling employer brand that resonates with potential employees is no longer a "nice-to-have." It's an absolute must!
Attracting people that value inclusion requires an intentional and consistent focus on building a narrative across your hiring materials that reinforces your commitment to fostering an environment of inclusion and belonging at your company.
Measurement can help here. Knowing how your language changes over time enables you to set specific and measurable goals to increase inclusive language and reduce exclusionary language that may be off-putting to candidates who value inclusion. Today, Textio is launching in-product language trend reports to help you do just that.
How to use language trend reports
Textio's new in-product language change reports analyze language trends across your public-facing job posts, helping you keep a pulse on whether your inclusive values are shining through and where you may have room to improve.
With these reports, you can more easily understand:
- How you’re sounding to job seekers in the market
- How your use of engaging, problematic, and gendered language is changing over time
- What opportunities you have to adopt or avoid specific phrases across your hiring content to better reflect your inclusive values
Log into your Textio account and click on the "Reports" link in the navigation header to access reports. You'll find three new reports available under the "Published Job Post Reports" heading.
Your new reports
Engaging phrase usage: This report focuses on the language that shows candidates that you value a diversity of experiences and perspectives, and highlights your company's desire to build a team that can learn, grow, and thrive together. You want to adopt more engaging language across your hiring content like the phrases recommended.
Problematic phrase usage: This report focuses on the language that inadvertently shuts the door on talent from underrepresented groups, as well as folks who value inclusion and are looking to see their next employer share those values. Suppose you're using corporate cliches that exclude those unfamiliar with the terms, or language that is ableist, racist, sexist, ageist, or otherwise disrespectful of a person's identity or culture. In that case, many people will not see themselves belonging and thriving at your company. You want to avoid problematic language across your hiring content like the phrases recommended.
Gendered phrase usage: This report focuses on the language that resonates with some gender groups more than others in past writing. Using these phrases shifts the tone of your hiring content to be more 'masculine' or 'feminine.' You want to change your language to achieve a gender-neutral tone to appeal to candidates of all genders.
Analyzing your language
Now, let's jump into an example “problematic phrase usage” report and walk through a few specific features you'll use to gain actionable insights to improve your language.
In this report, Textio analyzes your public job listings and shows you how often problematic phrases appear in your job descriptions. In the trend graph, you can see how often problematic language has appeared in your job posts in the last 90 days. You can compare the current quarter's activity to previous quarters to determine whether this language is trending up or down. Hovering over any point on the line graph will display the average number of problematic phrases used as well as the number of job posts they appeared in.
The example above shows that problematic phrase usage has been steadily trending up for the last quarter. This increase indicates that the problematic language in your job postings may discourage job seekers looking for a company culture that values inclusion—the people you want to appeal to and who help build your inclusive workplace.
Just below the trend chart, you can view a summary of the top phrases driving this increase. In this example, you can see that by removing the words "synergy," "stakeholders," and "super smart" from your content, you can reduce problematic phrase usage in your published job postings by 14%!
Moving down past the phrase usage summary section, you can view the complete list of all of the top problematic phrases present in your public job posts in the last 90 days. You can track the number of occurrences for each phrase, the percentage of job posts in which they occur, and whether phrase usage is increasing or decreasing. The list view and phrase summary help you understand where best to target your efforts to remove harmful language.
This example focused on the problematic phrase language report, but you can also perform similar analyses using the gendered and engaging phrase language reports. Use the gendered phrase language report to create more gender-neutral content that can appeal to candidates of all genders. Use the engaging phrase report to find words that you seldom use that could help you create more engaging and inclusive content. This report is a great resource when you find yourself at a loss for how to make your language more engaging and inclusive.
When you invest in Textio, everyone on your team has the world's most advanced guidance behind their writing to make a more inclusive language choice each time they craft candidate-facing content.
With Textio's new in-product language trend reports, you can see how the language in your public-facing job posts evolves over time and where there are opportunities to further transform your language to sound more like you intend. Be sure to check out your reports today.
Not yet a Textio customer and want to learn more? We’d love to chat.
Textio's language trend reports are powered by publicly available job posts from more than 25,000 employer websites globally. In some cases, language data for a specific company may be either unavailable or not large enough to calculate meaningful trends.
