

Textio: Predict based on your job ad how well you can hire - shalmanese
https://textio.com/

======
meeks
I just did the free trial and pasted in a current JD I have on some job
boards. The user interface is nice and easy to use. I like that I was able to
make updates and it would show my improved score in real time. However, now
that I have improved one of my JDs, I will use that knowledge to improve the
rest. So I feel like I have received all the value already present from the
product. I'm not sure there is enough of a draw to spend $99 a month to check
the content of my JDs. Also, I wish that it would give me suggestions for
female oriented phrases as my JD uses 100% male language. I can't just come up
with female phrases, I'm a guy! Overall, I like the product and I wish overall
it had more advice to give in helping improve my recruiting process.

~~~
shalmanese
Yeah, but if each job ad is costing you, conservatively, $10K in time, labor &
recruiting costs to fill, are you really going to quibble over $99 a month?
Even if it can only improve the ad 1%, it still seems worth it.

~~~
dasil003
Not for large companies, but for startups this type of mentality is dangerous,
not because of the $100 per se, but because all these little things add up
quickly to a big burn rate.

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zucchinis
I find the categorization of masculine and feminine words in this tool to be
very presumptuous.

This is what I got from a few random JD samples.

Masculine Words \- manage \- manages \- under pressure \- best-in-class \-
whatever it takes \- drive to \- exhaustive \- overseeing

Feminine Words \- community \- interpersonal \- be part of \- serves \- strive
\- care \- encourages \- connection \- helpful \- comfortable

Isn't this just enforcing false assumptions about gender differences rather
than preventing gender bias? Who is to say that women don't want to oversee,
manage, or have the drive to be the "best-in-class"? Who is to say that men
aren't interested in fostering community, working in teams, being helpful and
caring?

~~~
zer00
[http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/gendered_wordi...](http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/gendered_wording_JPSP.pdf?docID=16121)

Pretty interesting study that proves that gendered wording of applications
actually makes a significant difference in the gender ratio of folks who
apply. The gender biases we've been socialized with might be false assumptions
many times, but it's still the programming many people operate on.

~~~
zucchinis
This is a really interesting study. But I wouldn't assume correlation implies
causation here. Just because there are more male or female applicants to job
postings that contain specific words does not mean the words themselves are
attracting certain types of applicants. Many of the masculine words are words
associated with higher-level management and higher pay jobs. There are less
women who make it to this level so naturally there are less women applicants
to these types of jobs.

Jobs associated with the feminine words such as "caring" and "serves" tend to
be lower-level service-oriented jobs. Women don't apply to these because they
are attracted to the words. They apply to them because more women are in the
economic position to apply to these jobs over high-status high-skilled jobs
because of historical and societal issues. I'm not sure categorizing these
words as masculine and feminine is doing anything more than reflecting the
existing gender-imbalance in labor although it is interesting to think about
how this knowledge could be used constructively.

~~~
zer00
Did you read the whole paper? They control for the type of job in the multiple
studies conducted in this paper - the job same job is advertised with
differently worded postings. They also ran tests with male-dominated
professions, female-domainated professions, and neutral professions - the
result was the same.

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danshapiro
I was a beta user, and am now a paying customer.

I was skeptical when I started using the product; I've been hiring for nearly
two decades and figured that the company's algorithm wasn't going to be able
to improve on my experience. Now I'm pretty sure I was wrong. The suggestions
make sense and are, for the most part, clearly improvements. I've had readers
look at "before and after" without knowing which is which and they uniformly
prefer the "after".

I strongly recommend trying the free trial out, if it's still available, and
seeing for yourself. I find it well worth the $99/month.

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choppaface
I wish recruiters would use this to revise their InMail messages... if they
saw their whole email highlighted in red "very negative, corporate jargon"
perhaps there would be fewer spammers out there.

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donasarkar
I'm a writer and consider myself to understand people pretty well, so I didn't
think I'd benefit. Lo and behold, my JD scores were 80ish. Not terrible, but
room for improvement. I re-wrote 5 of them using the tool and not only were
they so much shorter and more compelling, but I got many more applicants from
a bigger pool w/o having to use a headhunter (which is a huge cost savings by
itself). We are now using this to re-write all of the JDs in my bigger org.

One other thing I'm going to do is use the tool for a bunch of our website
copy. That's not quite the same as JDs, but I do want to understand the "tone"
we're using.

Totally worth the $99/month.

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peteretep
I have access to and have been performing detailed analysis of a much much
larger data set than they have access to. Location, salary, which job boards
you use, and how high you come up in the rankings of which job boards you post
to will have an effect that absolutely swamps their "magic number".

When someone has a proprietary number that they show you to describe something
- "Textio Score", "KLOUT NUMBER", etc, you're being sold snake oil.

Don't waste your money.

~~~
atomatica
Where can we find your snake oil-free alternative?

~~~
habitue
There may not be an alternative, but that doesn't mean it isn't snake-oil. (It
doesn't mean it is either. Those two things are independent)

But, what he's saying has a good point, whether or not textio is snakeoil:
it's better to have numbers other people can compare to, even if the method
for determining those numbers isn't made public.

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Peroni
The only differences I can find between this and [http://gender-
decoder.katmatfield.com/](http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/) is that it
highlights spelling errors and repeated words.

Not sure how you can justify $99p/m when there are plenty of tools that do the
exact same job for free.

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koddi
Here is what our listing looked like before Textio, with a ~40ish score on
their scale:

[https://gist.github.com/enndott/3770037233b854a810f1](https://gist.github.com/enndott/3770037233b854a810f1)

Here's what it looks like after, with an 83:

[https://gist.github.com/enndott/3fdb88ddf955363ad2da](https://gist.github.com/enndott/3fdb88ddf955363ad2da)

Mostly turned we statements to you statements, softened some language (should
vs. must,) went a little more gender neutral (premier vs. top tier,) and added
an equal opportunity statement. It is recommending to use longer sentences and
add more you statements to improve further. Thoughts?

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>You will work on a team smart, experienced, motivated, and ambitious

Just a heads up on this sentence

~~~
koddi
The blinders must have been on... fixed & thank you :)

~~~
eterm
Now it contains "team team" :)

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scottfr
I wonder what the legal implications of having a "gender bias" detector are.

If you use Textio and publish a job description with the gender bias anywhere
other than 0, doesn't that open you up to gender discrimination claims?

~~~
rjaco31
You can always argue that you honestly felt that your version was less gender-
biased & that you disagreed with Textio on that particular example.

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dangero
Interesting I wonder where they got their dataset from.

~~~
shalmanese
I had the same question. If they truly have job ad & outcome data from 10,000
companies, I feel like they could build a lot more interesting things than a
fancy word processor.

~~~
dangero
One thought I have of where it might come from is some other job sites list
how many people applied for a particular job. If they scraped that information
plus the job posting they could gather this type of data pretty quick.

~~~
shalmanese
But, if that's the case, then that's measuring the wrong thing. In many ways,
a lot of applicants are an anti-signal. It means you're spending time sifting
through a huge haystack searching for that 1 needle. Ideally, they have data
on like, the 5 year performance review for the candidate hired or something
like that which is why I said I have no idea how they would get such data.

~~~
johanneskanybal
That depends on what question you are trying to answer. To get a lot of people
to apply is one metric. You seem more concerned with the quality of the
applicants which is fair enough but it's implied yourcvio or human beeings
will take care of that part. I could still see some use for this even if I
wouldn't pay too much attention to the score itself.

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emilyendash
Yeah, I wonder about the gender discrimination too. So a plurality of
men/women, at this point, are more likely to apply if you emphasize certain
words. But won't that keep changing? The dataset isn't going to remain static,
especially for non-overt language. (Their website mentions women prefer
premier to top tier, and I remember reading the same about expertise and
specialty).

Most people now get that synergy is a terrible word. But they'll just replace
it with something that won't show up on the radar until it seriously starts
putting people off. And, if they do have access to such a rich dataset, why
not be more precise, as someone mentioned? Find out what kind of listing is
most likely to appeal to a networking person who is looking to switch into dev
ops.

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sleepychu
Are you aware that your front page has "more women will apply" highlighted in
a colour that looks almost identical to your negative highlight? I only saw
the difference when I looked at the images full res.

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jkchu
This is a really cool product, I wonder how easy it would be to branch the
software to be used in other areas.

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erikb
Is there a tool like this for email? I'd instantly use that!

~~~
Mahn
There's Crystal[1], which got some attention on AngelList, but it honestly
looks like vaporware to me.

[1] [https://www.crystalknows.com/](https://www.crystalknows.com/)

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normloman
Presumably, a sexist hiring manager could use this to craft a job ad that only
appeals to men.

But this will almost certainly do more good than harm.

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suttree
"Good use of bulleted lists"

Sigh.

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MichaelCrawford
im building the The Global Comouter Employer Index at
[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/).
not really global yet but look at seattle or portland.

i link directly to the careers pages of each employer's website, like
[http://www.google.com/jobs/](http://www.google.com/jobs/)

but a common problem is that companies advertise on job boards but not on
their own sites. sometimes, even if i do i cant find the link.

sometimes i can google it.

