Why the best job posts come from team effort

You have just been handed the daunting task of writing the job description for a new requisition. Where do you begin? Do you start staring at a blinking cursor on a blank document? Maybe scour around for a similar one from two or three years ago? Do you have your own hybrid approach? I work with HR teams in organizations large and small, and I have met very few professionals who enjoy pounding out a job post from scratch. So what if there were an easier way to work together? In school it may have been generally frowned upon to reuse great content from your classmates, but in hiring teams, reusing great content results in better job posts.

Reduce digital clutter with a centralized location for job posts

Where do your job posts currently live? When I pose that question to HR teams, the response often begins with a chuckle followed by a confession. They are all over the place. Hard drives, hidden away in emails, shared on the network, up in the cloud — what a mess!

Maybe you are personally organized with your job posts, but your colleagues or hiring managers… not so much. Having a job post library is a game changer. If all previously finished job posts are stored in the library, there’s no need to wait for someone to find a file and send it to you. Would be collaborators can go get the content they need from their team at the moment they need it.

This is something Textio offers: a document library as the go to place to write and store job posts. This saves precious time. There is no trying to recall where that job post from last year might have been saved. No more saying, “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.” No more asking your colleague (yet again) if they have found that document they promised to send last week. Reducing the complex and often informal storage process to something organized and simple reduces clutter and stress, but more importantly, opens the doorway to more team collaboration.

Share your work, reuse great content, repeat

Storing job posts in one place is the first step of improved collaboration. In order to build a great library, you have to believe this about job posts collaboration: sharing is caring. Make your work available in your library. If everyone is sharing to one place, how can we find what we are looking for? Tagging your job posts with searchable fields such as job title, location, job type, author, or other handy factors makes it easy for others to find your great content.

This is another area where Textio can help. When you start writing in Textio, your document begins as a draft visible only to you. When you move a document from draft state to shared or finished, it becomes searchable, sortable, and able to be copied by your whole team. You build a quality library for your team when everyone is tagging their work and marking it as shared or finished.

Need some input or approval before a post goes live? Share your documents. When you move your document to “shared”, your whole team can not only see that document in the library, they have the power to help you edit it. (Only you can call it finished, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) If a colleague helps you edit it, their name shows up along with yours as an author. And if you don’t appreciate their input you can go even go back in time to the way you had it by clicking on “History”.

When you are ready to post your job posts, mark it as “finished”. In this state, the document becomes read-only but is still searchable in the library. Best of all, you or your team can make a new copy from it at any time. If you write a high-performing post today and mark it finished, your team (and probably your future self) will thank you later.

Recycle old content, but make sure it’s up to date

Over time, both language and job responsibilities change. As a result, there often multiple version of a job post inside a company. Have you ever had 5 or more versions of the “same” job post, how do you compare which one is best? Should you start with the file called “job_post_v2.0.docx” or “final_edit_job_post_2015.docx”? Who wants the time-consuming job of opening and comparing all these files? No one.

What if at a glance you could identify which of these 5 documents is predicted to perform the best in today’s market? In the Textio document library you can! Because Textio is learning from 10 million job posts and outcomes a month, the Textio Score next to each post is based on current language patterns of today! So whether it was written 2 years ago or 2 months ago, the Textio Score for the post is LIVE! Textio is predicting how it will perform today. The days of opening files and comparing multiple job posts are over.

Even in the days we opened multiple files and made a couple of edits, we had a big problem. When changed a word choice or phrase, you couldn’t really tell if you were helping or making it worse. With the power of augmented writing at your fingertips, you get instant feedback on the impact that your edits are making on the document. Ok, so the perfect score you achieved when writing for engineering req a few months ago is no longer scoring 100. No problem. Make a new copy (or change the document state to shared with one click if it is yours) and quickly make the edits to revive its “purple squirrel” status. It’s not only easy to reuse great content, it’s easy to improve its performance even more in a couple of minutes before posting. That’s the power of augmented writing!

The best job posts are a result of team collaboration

When the documents in your Textio library are available to your team for this level of collaboration, it has the power to improve the work created by HR team. By the way, it also has the power to win better talent for the entire organization, too. Global companies like Procter & Gamble are multilingual. Some recruiters write posts in English though it is their second language. These recruiters now have access to posts written by other English writers around the world while still receiving Textio’s targeted language guidance unique to the location of the job.

Customer data tells us that teams that share their work improve their Textio scores as they move through the collaborative process. For example, at the end of 2017, the semiconductor and software design company Arm had an average Textio Score of 63 for all their drafts. The average score of the documents available for team editing in shared status jumped to 82. The average score of their finished documents was an impressive 92. As these documents have no doubt moved into the public space, the average score of Arm’s publicly available job posts improved 11 points vaulting them 230 spots in the rankings of the Textio Index. Collaboration improves the quality of job posts.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle are not just strategies good for the planet. They are keys that unlock collaboration for your HR team. These collaborative features are built into Textio and ready for any HR team to start using today! Want even more collaboration, say the kind needed to tame enterprise-sized job libraries? Then be sure check out the next level of collaboration available using Textio Groups.