The Most Commonly Used Words In Tech Giants' Job Listings Will Make You Never Want To Work At A Tech Giant
When you're job hunting, what kind of language in a job description makes the job feel like a good fit for you? Depending on your disposition and your demographic, different words and phrases are likely to either resonate with you or appall you. If you're a competitive workaholic, you might be drawn toward words like "fast paced" and "driven." If you like having a life outside of your job, you might prefer job descriptions peppered with words like "flexible" and "relationships." Basically, every job description is filled with dog whistles that attract a certain type of applicant — and repel everyone else.
A few months ago, the recruiting consulting firm Textio analyzed 25,060 job listings from 10 major tech companies from the past year to figure out the most distinctive phrases used in their job descriptions. "The distinct phrases used by each company showed up in their jobs much more often than they did for other companies in the sample, and frequently way more often than average for the industry," Textio explains.
The results were probably not surprising to people who work in Silicon Valley but frankly kind of scary to us. Here are the top three most distinctive phrases for each company, in alphabetical order:
"Maniacal"? "Whatever it takes"? "Ruthlessly"? Are these job listings or character descriptions for Disney movie villains? Textio points out that these aggressive descriptors belie whatever claims companies may make about wanting to improve diversity.
In large organizations, you don't end up with thousands of people using the same words by accident. The patterns that show up across your company's jobs show what you truly value.
Sometimes this can be at odds with what you say you value. When your PR talks about work/life balance, but your team consistently advertises jobs that are work hard/play hard, your team is the one telling the truth.
One important footnote revealing that this study was not exactly free of conflicts of interest: Textio discloses that "Apple, Slack, and Twitter are Textio customers, along with some divisions at Microsoft; the rest are not." This might explain why Apple, Slack and Twitter's most distinctive words are less evocative of a serial murderer than their competitors'. In an ideal world, a company wouldn't need to hire a consulting firm to tell them that describing their ideal candidate as "insatiable" is probably going to scare a bunch of qualified people off. But we clearly don't live in an ideal world.
