Getting Familiar With SMS Recruitment

If you’ve ever worked in recruitment, you probably know how amazing it feels to land the right candidate. Finding someone who is ideal for an open position, however, can take a great deal of time, money, and effort when you use traditional methods. Posting job ads on various websites, for instance, can be quite costly, considering the various subscription fees you may be paying.

While those costs may eventually pay off, you can shift your resources towards contacting potential candidates directly. That’s where SMS recruitment comes in. 

The process of reaching out to and hiring a candidate often takes weeks. And in many cases, you’re likely competing with other companies for top talent. Text recruiting, however, gives you the competitive edge you need in the job market. 

While job seekers are swamped with everything from emails to direct messages, you can stand out of the crowd with a well-written SMS message. In this article, you’ll find out all you need to know about using SMS text campaigns for recruitment purposes.

What Is SMS Recruitment?

SMS recruitment is the process of utilizing SMS messages to bring talent into your company. Applicants aren’t always able to check emails or answer phone calls, which is why replying to texts is much more convenient. 

A recruiter can use SMS for a number of purposes. These include scheduling interviews, sending interview reminders, addressing candidates’ questions, and keeping in touch with applicants throughout the hiring process. 

How Does SMS Recruitment Work?

Not only is sending an SMS for recruitment a great way to make sure that qualified candidates see the message, but it also allows you to build a connection and enhance the candidate experience. Essentially, you’d be texting the applicants individually to keep them in the loop. This allows you to connect with shortlisted applicants faster and speed up the whole recruitment process. 

Let’s suppose one of the candidates left a great impression in the first interview and you want to take the hiring process to the next step. In this case, you would send them an SMS alert inviting them to a second interview. And when that second interview is right around the corner, you can send the shortlisted candidate an SMS reminder in advance to make sure they don’t forget. This generally makes the whole process more convenient for both you and the applicant. 

Top Reasons to Utilize Text Recruiting

Faster Process

Recruiting employees can be somewhat tedious in many cases. But, candidates who are in high demand don’t normally stay in the market for more than 10 days on average. That being said, a lengthy hiring process can ruin your chances of landing top talent. Considering that people often tend to respond to SMS messages right away, text recruiting can essentially streamline the process. 

Higher Response Rates

Needless to say, most people spend a considerable amount of time on their phones each day. This naturally contributes to higher response and open rates. You won’t need to worry about the recruitment SMS getting lost in the spam folder.

The information you relay is practically going straight to the palm of the candidate’s hand. And even if they don’t respond, it’s safe to say that they will almost always see the text. 

More Personal Connection

In the case of business-to-consumer marketing strategies, building a connection with customers goes a long way. The same concept holds true for hiring talent with business text messaging.

SMS company recruitment basically humanizes the talent acquisition process. When you send recruiting text messages to candidates, you automatically form a more personal connection with them and keep applicants updated. You can keep your candidates engaged by incorporating a friendly yet professional tone into the text.

Cost-Effective Choice

It’s no surprise that posting a job and hiring an employee can cost a great deal of time and money. Text message recruiting is a cost-effective option that helps you find the right person more efficiently. You’ll also be able to reach a larger audience, which in turn gives you a wider and more diverse talent pool to choose from. This further boosts your chances of landing a suitable candidate for the job. 

When Can Text Recruiting Come in Handy?

Reaching Out to Former Applicants

It’s common for companies to have a long list of previous applicants who may not have had the right qualifications at the time. But, many of these applicants likely picked up a good deal of skills and experience since then. By reaching out to them through SMS recruitment, you can have a quick chat in real time to determine whether they’d be suitable for the current job. 

Contacting Former Employees

Employees often move on from a company in search of better opportunities. Text message recruiting can be ideal for reaching out to those former employees to see if they’d be interested in a new position. You’ve already worked with them before so knowing whether they’d be a good fit or not shouldn't be a problem. You will also want to include instructions for opting out, and make sure to mention your name in the initial SMS message to avoid appearing as spam. 

Establishing New Relationships

Before getting in touch or hopping on a call, text recruiting helps establish a relationship with new applicants and get more familiar with them. This allows you to scrape some time off the interview process and enables you to touch base should you be bringing in more people during the next recruitment period. It’s also a great way to draw the attention of candidates—and motivate them to join the team—by sharing stories of happy employees. 

Helpful Tips for Using SMS Recruitment

Avoid Spamming the Candidate

While SMS recruiting is a popular tool for talent acquisition, it only means that it's more common for businesses to abuse it by spamming entire contact lists with job application ads. As efficient as it may sound, doing this is actually annoying for the recipients and detrimental to your company. 

Include Directions for Opting Out

As with mass texting for marketing purposes, it’s often a good idea to include opt-out instructions in the recruitment messages you send out. Doing so may seem inconvenient, but it can prevent your number from getting blocked. It’s better if the recipient opts out rather than reports you. To make things easier, you can always create a reusable template for the opt-out directions. 

Reach Out to Recipients Within Business Hours

Separating work from personal life is undoubtedly important. This also applies to text message recruiting. Having said that, make sure to stick to business hours when you’re sending SMS recruitment messages to candidates.

While some people may not mind them, others tend to find them rather invasive and unprofessional. Besides the candidates, it’s also important for your own work-life balance. 

Use Social Media to Make the Initial Contact

Consider making the initial contact via a social media platform such as LinkedIn. After finding and reaching out to a potential candidate through social media, you can suggest texting via SMS. It’s always a good idea to obtain their permission before sending them an SMS message.

Avoid using available phone numbers to randomly text potential candidates. Once you get the green light, make sure to let them know how often they’ll be receiving messages and what information you’ll be relaying to them.

Target Your Recipients

If you have a list of contacts who have opted in, keep that database clean. Only target the recipients who have been responsive in the past. You can do this by filtering candidates by qualification and sending recruitment SMS messages to those who may fit the role.

As for cleaning your database, narrow down the contact list by asking some simple yes-or-no questions. For instance:

1. Is [recipient’s name] still at this number?

2. Are you still interested in receiving SMS messages from [company name]?

3. Are you open for a new position?

Make Use of a Specialized Platform

You can engage in SMS recruitment from your personal or business mobile phone. But handling dozens of replies and different conversations can be overwhelming—those numbers can even be in the hundreds, if not thousands. A specialized SMS platform can take that weight off your shoulders. In most cases, bulk SMS service providers even allow you to conveniently manage your messages and replies via a dashboard. 

Is SMS Recruitment Better Than Other Options?

It goes without saying that certain recruitment strategies are always essential. That being said, you can’t expect to replace all those approaches with text-based recruiting. Instead, SMS recruitment enhances the hiring process by helping you get in touch with candidates as quickly as possible. 

Should you be doing a lot of mass recruitment, other strategies will still come in handy. These typically include emails, social media, job posting websites, and job fairs. Ultimately, you can consider text recruiting to be a part of the whole process, allowing you to save time and money where possible. 

Text Recruiting With Dexatel

When it comes to sending alerts and reminders regarding interviews, job openings, and the like, SMS solutions by Dexatel can come in handy. Also an SMS marketing service, Dexatel provides a platform that helps you schedule meetings, manage contacts, send notifications, and more. You’ll be able to personalize messages, use ready-made templates, have one-on-one conversations with applicants, and monitor important details. Sign up now and enhance your SMS recruitment process.