NVIDIA reboots its job description engine

NVIDIA’s Monica Spehar is tasked with boosting hiring metrics — at a company that’s obsessed with metrics. “At NVIDIA we live and die by our data,” she explains. “We crave data.”

As Program Manager for University Recruiting and Diversity, Spehar often reminds her team that improving talent metrics is about playing “the long game.” In other words, work fast but be patient: don’t expect meaningful change overnight. That’s why she was so impressed by the speed of impact that Textio has had on NVIDIA’s hiring process.

Early this year, Fast Company named NVIDIA one of the most innovative companies of 2017, thanks to its forays into medical science, smart cars, and virtual reality. “Once known as a gaming-centric maker of graphics chips,” the magazine reported, “NVIDIA now applies its expertise in computationally intense applications to some of the digital world’s most ambitious new vistas.”

Innovative thinking is obviously built into NVIDIA’s corporate culture, and for Spehar that includes constant modernization across talent acquisition. “One of my key roles is to look for tools and programs that’ll help improve NVIDIA’s processes and recruitment goals,” Spehar says. After hearing about Textio from a training consultant, Spehar and her team quickly decided to activate a free trial.

First impressions matter—a lot

Having sat through dozens of sales demos for HR tech tools, Spehar was surprised at how easily she could see positive outcomes from Textio’s augmented writing platform, without assistance from a sales rep. “Saying that the first impression was fast and immediate is an understatement. I was able to — in the trial, within two minutes — drop in one of my own job descriptions and see results. I’ve never experienced that before.”

Her team’s reactions to their historical Textio Score, though, were not so positive. In the Textio Index, NVIDIA’s public job postings were scoring just 18 on average (out of 100), and their overall gender tone would statistically attract more men to apply for jobs than women. Motivated by the strong potential for improvement, NVIDIA started up a Textio enterprise subscription, and the rollout was the fastest Spehar has ever seen in adopting a new HR platform.

“Within the first few hours, 55–60 people were going into the tool. They immediately went in and created accounts,” she says. “The following week we found out that hiring managers were opening up Textio in team meetings, and saying ‘Hey did you hear what recruiting did? Here it is, check it out.’”

Metrics-based goals drive friendly competition

In retrospect, Spehar believes that giving people access to Textio “poked the bear” of the industry’s naturally competitive nature. “Our staffing team meets weekly to go over our goals, and for the third week in a row it was ‘Who’s #1? Who has the highest score?’ And it’s not just the recruiters, it’s the sourcers, it’s the coordinators — this is our whole staff.”

“Everyone is looking at the scores. Everyone wants to see us improve, right up to our CEO.”

“We had (set a Textio Score goal of) 60, but that was too easy,” she adds. “Then we set it to 75. And even then we have our hiring management team saying: ‘That’s too low. I’m not going to go that low.’ Even they are trying to hit 100. Everyone is looking at the scores. Everyone wants to see us improve, right up to our CEO.” In their latest usage update, NVIDIA’s shared library of job listings had a Textio Score that was north of 80 — and rising fast.

It seems that NVIDIA’s innovation culture has found a kindred spirit in Textio. “I think Textio is challenging us to completely relaunch and relook at how we’re writing our job descriptions as a whole,” Spehar reports. “People are really having fun with it, though. It’s kind of brought the fun aspect of writing good job descriptions back for us, and I think it’s been really great.”