Job description best practices based on hiring data
Apr 02, 2024
My first attempt at managing people was when I was a naïve, fresh-faced 24-year-old. My team was going through a reorg, and one of our managers was leaving the team. It turns out that because I had gotten great performance reviews in three years as a software PM, I was somehow suddenly qualified to manage a whole team of other (all significantly older) PMs.
My boss said this was the next career step if I wanted to get ahead, so, despite me knowing nothing about leading people and having absolutely no experience managing, I said, “Yes, of course!”
And I was scared shitless.
I knew how to write code, how to spec features, how to design software—but suddenly, in a week’s time, I was going to be responsible for the work livelihood of six other grown adults. I felt that “lose my lunch” pit-of-the-stomach anxiety.
So, I did what any other self-respecting manager wannabe would do: I drove to Barnes & Noble that night and looked for any books I could find about managing people. I think I bought two—a paperback version of something like Managing for Dummies and a thick hardback tome that seemed more research-oriented like The International Business Machines Handbook For Inter-Personal Dynamic Personnel Management Copyright © 1952 IBM, Inc.
I read most of the Dummies guide and like the first 25 pages of the dry business book. The company I worked for also gave me a two page “Hey, you are a manager now!” Word document to read, and my manager spent a 30-minute 1:1 talking through it with me.
“Here’s how to manage employees,” he said. “Tell ‘em what you're asking for, ask for it, and tell them what you asked for. Boom, you’re good to go, if you got any other questions, you know where to find me.”
And with that extremely limited and perfunctory training, I was suddenly accountable for leading a team of PMs, responsible for guiding their careers, helping them navigate their career aspirations and roadblocks, enabling them to reach their full potential at work.
I could not have been less well-prepared.
Yet, we do this every day, at every company, all around the world. We take people who are good at something else—the best marketer, the best engineer, the best salesperson—and suddenly change their job to make it mostly about a new discipline they know basically nothing about: managing people.
And here’s the scary thing: managing people is both REALLY HARD and REALLY IMPORTANT.
For most employers, their workforce is both the most expensive asset they manage and the most essential. The people working at a company literally define it—the products they make, the experience their customers have, the success of their bottom line. We entrust every one of those employees to a manager, most of them desperate for help, for guidance to help them do a better job at growing and supporting the humans they are entrusted with.
And we give them tools to work with that are 1990’s-style manager training, a few empty white text boxes to type feedback into, and maybe a Slack notification or two reminding them that those empty white text boxes are still waiting for their awesome manager insights to fill them.
Is it any wonder most of the top reasons great people leave their company boil down to “poor-quality feedback from their manager”?
Textio is the essential AI for managers
When I took on the role as Textio’s new CEO in January, I firmly refocused the company around an incredibly important mission: giving people managers the phenomenal tools they deserve to help them be successful.
Textio has always been on the side of managers. We have long been known for creating industry-leading recruiting AI tools that help managers and the recruiting teams who support them fill millions of roles on their teams more quickly and with greater candidate reach. This part isn’t going to change.
But now, we are doing more: Textio is centering people managers in everything we do and everything we build.
At its core, all people managers are asked to do two essential things: 1) define clear accountabilities and 2) provide great feedback. Textio has built breakthrough software to help every manager do a great job at both of these things.
There's no bigger opportunity to transform the experience of work than helping managers have phenomenal tools to do a better and more confident job leading their people every day.
Our Textio Lift performance management and feedback product, introduced last year, is already helping over 100,000 managers write effective and clear feedback for their teams in a fraction of the time with the power of Textio AI. This product is the culmination of the people-centered AI platform we’ve been building since 2014.
Textio helps managers get beyond the white empty text box, giving them real-time coaching as they write feedback—even helping them generate effective feedback quickly from raw notes or a bullet list of unfocused thoughts. Textio Lift makes sure that every employee gets impactful, clear, and effective feedback and that managers spend less time struggling with it.
Managers who use Textio Lift spend less time writing feedback, but their employees say it’s the most effective feedback they’ve ever received.
This is the new Textio—bringing the trusted power of Textio AI to every people manager, everywhere in the world.
A new Textio deserves a new brand
This is such a big moment in our company’s history that, to be honest, it feels like a company relaunch of sorts.
And so, along with this new, clear focus on managers, we are introducing a brand new, vibrant brand and logo. Throughout our products, web sites, and integrations, you’ll see this bold new Textio, starting today.
The new “Scribble” logo is energetic, full of life, and represents the diversity and breadth of the humans we caretake as managers. It looks both like a burst of positive energy and also a little like the highlights Textio pops up as you write to help you find the right words.
You can download this new logo and see the usage guidelines on the Textio Design site. We’re really excited about what this new brand and focused direction means to the next chapter of Textio.
Leaders who are serious about their people should invest in great managers
Never again should a fresh-faced 24-year-old new manager be left alone with 1990s-style manager training and a “go get ‘em” from their boss.
Every manager deserves exceptional software that empowers them to nurture and advance the careers of the people they're entrusted to lead.
Pretty much every people leader wants to do a good job—we are building a world in which all of them can have the essential tools at their fingertips to do just that.
This is the new Textio. AI for managers, built on our trusted Textio AI platform, putting people leaders and the great teams they grow at our center.
