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Textio, maker of AI-powered tools to augment business writing, today announced a new product to help recruiters reach out to job candidates.
Like the company’s first service, which uses AI to help customers write better job descriptions, Textio’s second offering helps companies write recruiting messages by scoring them on a 100-point scale. It also provides writers with information about how they might want to change their text, including suggestions to avoid pressuring candidates, since that can make people less likely to respond.
Zillow Group, an early customer, saw a 16 percent increase in responses to recruiting messages after implementing the product. Johnson & Johnson recruiters reported a 25 percent increase.
This is the Seattle-based startup’s first new service following its flagship text analysis product for job descriptions. Textio cofounder and CEO Kieran Snyder told VentureBeat in an interview that the company made the move because of its customers’ behavior. A user at Atlassian said the tech company was trying to use Textio to write recruiting mail, something the company saw repeated across its other customers.
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“Recruiters write about 100 of these for every job post that’s out there,” Snyder said. “And they’re mostly pretty terrible, so if you get those outreaches, mostly you’re probably not answering them. And so we really started thinking about ‘What if we could attach the platform next to that kind of writing?’”
It’s also an opportunity for the startup to prove that its vision of selling augmented writing services to business users has applications beyond the realm of job descriptions.
While recruiting mail and job descriptions are related, Textio’s job description optimization algorithm offers different feedback from the one used for recruiting mail, with each focusing on the factors most likely to affect the desired outcome.
For example, the job description algorithm tends to emphasize bullet points, since optimizing those can have a significant impact on how well a post performs. But they don’t matter as much to recruiting mail, where requesting responses from recipients is more important.
Customers can purchase the recruiting mail analysis service separately or as part of the Textio Hire bundle, which includes the company’s job description service. Textio negotiates a price for its software with individual customers, so there’s no one-size-fits-all pricing chart. However, the cost of Textio Hire should be lower than that of purchasing the two services independently.
In the future, Textio plans to tackle other applications — like sales outreach — where its AI writing assistance can provide concrete benefits to business applications.
