Kieran Snyder
CEO at Textio
Discussion
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
Hi! I'm Kieran Snyder, the CEO and Co-Founder of Textio, a predictive engine that tells you who's going to apply to your job posts based on the language you use. Textio finds insights in large document sets of any kind, and pinpoints the patterns in your writing that get provable results.
I have a PhD in natural language processing and led product and engineering organizations at Microsoft and Amazon before founding Textio. I've written about bias in business documents in places like Fortune, Re/code, and the Washington Post.
I love talking about entrepreneurship, NLP and ML, and all things talent and team-building. Excited to chat!
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Philip Kuklis
@philipkuklis · Co-Founder, Hubble
Hi Kieran, you’ve recently mentioned that over the past 2+ years you had zero turnover in your team (Congrats!). What makes Textio’s culture so special and how do you plan to preserve it while growing your business?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@philipkuklis Thanks, it is something we are really proud of. There are two things we look for in everyone we hire regardless of role (and as you'd expect, they're in all our job posts). We look for people with a history of trying and learning new things - because every day you're going to come to work at any startup and have to do stuff you don't know how to do. That has to be energizing rather than overwhelming.
The other thing is we look for people who have a pov but are low ego. Both are really important.
Best way to preserve is to maintain the hiring bar on both of these attributes!
Clare Sayas
@claresayas · Tech PR @ Revere
I'm curious about your personal opinion on how businesses can make the "soft" job search more inclusive - or the practice of looking for candidates through personal connections only. Anecdotally, I have never gotten a job via cold application, but rather from people I knew from school, internships, etc. I've been very lucky, but recognize that practice can breed a monoculture within a company. How do you help break execs from that model?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@claresayas Word-of-mouth is going to be a significant factor in hiring. People like to recommend the people they've enjoyed working with before, and as a hiring manager, you should take advantage of that. People who love their jobs enough to recommend their workplaces to colleagues they value - this is awesome affirmation of your environment.
Given that this is always going to be a factor, the only way to avoid a monoculture is to make sure that the people on the ground represent a variety of networks - so the colleagues who get referred come from a broad range of places.
Naturally, intentional recruiting plays a big role here. If word-of-mouth is the only strategy, you're not likely to be happy with your team composition in the end.
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Kieran thanks for joining us today. Can a workforce become more diverse through using the correct language in job postings to attract a more diverse set of candidates?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@ems_hodge The data says yes, your team can become more diverse by changing the language you use to talk about your job! Customers who get above a 90 (out of 100) in Textio on their jobs see an average of 12-15% more applicants from underrepresented groups.
Not only that, but jobs where a woman is hired at the end of the process contain twice as much "feminine-tone" language as "masculine-tone language" in the initial job post. (These are phrases that statistically predict a higher % of women or men respectively applying to your job.) Makes sense - you're much more likely to hire a woman at the end of the day if you have more in your pipeline in the first place.
Ayrton De Craene
@ayrton · Code @ Product Hunt
How do you begin to define a companies culture from day one? Why is this important?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@ayrton Know what you value, and hire people who exhibit those characteristics. A company's culture may be set by its leadership, but it is carried by the people who work there. And if you're successful, the founders are quickly just a tiny % of the team. Make sure the team is right, because they are the ones who really show whether the company is a good place to work.
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
Do you use your knowledge of NLP on a day to day basis?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@bentossell I do. Back in college I double-majored in linguistics and math. Everything I've done since has built on that. Most of my tech career has been in NLP, internationalization, or the search space somewhere.
As a CEO I spend a lot of time with our data team working through models. I designed the first predictive model that Textio used!
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
If you had to swap lives with a tech CEO for a week, who would it be and why?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@bentossell I wouldn't swap lives with anyone. =) But if I could be a fly on the wall of their brains, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They have clear conviction about what they are making, and have seen their companies through every stage of growth.
Jackye Clayton
@jackyeclayton · Jackyeclayton@gmail.com
I see great potential for enhanced diversity recruiting capabilities. Is a more diversity focused module on your roadmap?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@jackyeclayton Great q. Textio exposes gender in our UI right now because our data set that allows us to find the patterns that work to hire candidates that self-identify as men/women respectively is particularly strong. But our Data Exchange customers - those who directly provide the hiring outcomes into Textio's engine to improve the system - get insights on all kinds of demographic attributes.
Today the set includes gender, ethnicity, age, veteran status, and disability status. All of these will make their way into our core experience as the data sets are strong enough. If we're going to let Textio make recommendations on something as important as bias, we need to make sure they are statistically robust.
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
How can NLP be useful to a founder?
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@andrewett I have always been obsessed with quantitative approaches to language. For me, the form this took in school was a focus on NLP. I studied linguistics and math before I knew that would become a powerful combination in the tech industry.
Right now this is a pretty powerful area of focus for tons of entrepreneurs. Learning loops are taking over the enterprise. Bots are hot. Virtual assistant space is exploding.
But beyond the specifics of your business, people who study NLP tend to be good at math and good at language. That's a powerful combo for anyone in tech. We build tech, but work with people in order to do it.
John Fowler
@johnsteerfowler · Founder, Zero Host
Hi Kieran. Thanks for doing a live chat. How do you think the recruitment/job postings industry is keeping up with technology? It's great to see companies like yours, but in general I feel it's still quite an archaic industry outside of Silicon Valley.
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Kieran Snyder
@kieransnyder · CEO, Textio
@steerj92 I come from a tech background and have been building engineering and product teams for many years. It's been eye-opening to me to see how hiring works in other industries, as it's often quite different.
Our first customers were in tech and finance, which is not surprising when you consider how attuned these industries are to using data to make decisions in general. As we've expanded into retail, the arts, pharma, healthcare, manufacturing, etc - very different cultures for hiring.
One thing that we get asked on customer calls all the time is what machine learning is. It's important to realize which context is shared and which context isn't...