Textio analyzes over a quarter-billion job postings to see where companies are putting the most jargon in their writing
Spoiler: Our nation’s capitol has won the jargon wars, hands down. According to Textio’s massive data set of job listings, Washington, D.C. is the place in the U.S. with the highest rate of business cliche usage, coming in at 2.5 times the national average.
Every state has its favorite corporate cliche, but if you’re job hunting in D.C., you’re 250% as likely to run into phrases like shift the paradigm, go the extra mile and change driver. Predictably (and statistically), this kind of language will likely depress the number of qualified people who respond to your job posting, along with a bunch of other “orange” phrases that Textio constantly surfaces from new hiring data.
The next closest states to D.C. are Washington at 1.8x, followed by New York and Oregon at about 1.6x each. In fact, the Northeast and the West Coast totally dominate the list of most jargony states: the only two states from the top 10 list that are not in those regions are Arizona and Georgia.
The least jargon-prone place in the U.S.? Wyoming. Companies in this plain-spoken state use corporate cliches at just 1/4 of the national rate.
Top 10 rates of jargon usage in job listings:
(As a multiple of the national average)
- Washington, DC: 2.48
- Washington: 1.79
- New York: 1.66
- Oregon: 1.59
- California: 1.30
- Maryland: 1.24
- Delaware: 1.16
- Connecticut: 1.16
- Georgia:1.14
- Arizona: 1.13
