Holly Fawcett (in a SocialTalent video) explains how gender-coded language in job postings influences candidate perceptions and application rates. She reports research showing masculine-coded wording reduces applications—especially from women—while feminine-coded wording increases applications from both women and men and can boost minority applications. She recommends tools to audit and rewrite job ads, naming Textio (paid) and the free 'gender decoder' as practical starting points.
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There's more to candidate acquisition than sourcing, and so attracting people to our organization through job posts is part of our strategy in filling our funnel with really great talent. Those biases or mental shortcuts that I spoke of earlier, they don't just happen to us on the recruiting side, they affect candidates as well. Candidates are similarly primed by sometimes inconsequential information that shapes the their perception as either positive or negative in some extremely subtle ways. For example, research has shown that having job descriptions filled with what is termed masculine coded verbs will prime both men and women into perceiving this job to be more undesirable than if it were filled with feminine coded verbs. More women and men will apply for a role that is feminine coded than if it were masculine coded. If a job ad is masculine coded, far fewer women and somewhat fewer men will apply. It's not that only women appreciate feminine coded language, so do men, and it's been proven to increase the application rate of minority talent as well. Some organisations have made huge strides in adapting their job posts and any other recruiting communications to be more feminine coded and they're reaping the benefits. They've done this by using paid for tools like Textio, which which is an enterprise product that will apply artificial intelligence to prompt you to change words as you're writing them and to give you insights and data on the likelihood of increasing diverse applications by selecting specific words in replacement. I'm not demanding that you go off and buy Textio. It is an expensive but hugely powerful tool. But if you want to get started using a free tool to analyze your job posts and your recruiting communications, there are some which are really simple and useful. The one I'd recommend that you start with is the free gender decoder tool. Just search for the phrase gender decoder. This will perform an instant assessment as to whether the text that you've inserted is primarily masculine, feminine or neutral coded and show you which words are most prevalent. It also has the full list of masculine and feminine words, so you can use that as a taxonomy to adapt your job posts and text manually. So as candidates read through your job posting, they'll get more of a yes feeling simply by using more feminine coded terms.
