Textio Inc. wants artificial intelligence to play a bigger role in how companies find new employees.

To that end, the Bloomberg LP-backed startup today introduced a service called Textio Hire that uses AI to fine-tune the text of the job offers that recruiters send out as part of their head-hunting campaigns. The product is designed to complement Textio’s flagship platform, which provides similar capabilities for optimizing job listings.

Textio said it uses data from “millions of job posts and recruiting mails” to understand what word combinations are most effective at attracting qualified candidates. Textio Hire, which takes the form of a Chrome extension, makes this information available to recruiters by assigning their messages a score based on the estimated likelihood that recipients will respond. The service also generates recommendations on how a job offer can be improved.

According to VentureBeat, one way Textio can help recruiters craft a better pitch is by pointing out cases in which an email gives the impression of pressuring a candidate to respond. Such a tone has the opposite effect in many cases. The startup says that Textio Hire also take into account the inherent structural differences between recruiting emails and job postings when generating recommendations.

Textio’s approach to head-hunting shares some similarities with what another startup called Gong.io Ltd. is doing in the field of business-to-business sales. Gong.io, which secured a $20 million funding round last year, provides a platform that uses AI to analyze customer calls and highlights ways to improve the deal-making process.

Textio claimed its new service has helped Johnson & Johnson recruiters increase the response rates to their emails by 25 percent. Online real-estate giant Zillow Inc. saw a 16 percent improvement during an internal trial.

Textio enables companies to buy the service together with its flagship job posting optimization service or on a standalone basis.

Image: Textio