Shopping for the best talent

After unveiling the Textio 50 earlier this month, we’ve embarked on a series of reports about Textio Index rankings for hiring performance in different industries, which started with U.S. airlines last week. Today—with just 2 days left in the busy holiday shopping season—we thought we should look at some of the big U.S. department stores.

Like airlines, big department store chains do a lot of hiring. Macy’s claims to be one of the 100 largest corporate workforces in the entire world, and they currently have more than 700 open job postings at their retail stores alone.

Also just like airlines, a department store’s customer service (especially in the retail days of the year) is only as good as the people they hire. None of the department stores we looked at currently have a Textio Score above 50, which is the overall average for the 50,000+ companies listed in the Textio Index. Bloomingdale’s is at the top of the list with a score of 49, followed closely by its parent company, Macy’s. Neiman Marcus comes in as the lowest of the five, with a score of just 26.

Interested in how these chains perform when it comes to hiring diverse teams? If you look up a company’s Textio Score on our site you’ll also get information on the gender tone of their job listings, which predicts the gender of the candidates that job posts are most likely to attract.

In this case the difference in tone across department stores is pretty interesting. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s all have a neutral gender tone on average.

Macy’s job posts are slightly feminine in tone, and Saks Fifth Avenue has more masculine job posts on average. In fact, Saks’ jobs are statistically more masculine in tone than 100% of industry competitors. That means that on average they are far more likely to hire men than any other department store in the Textio Index.