Insights into Upgrading your Recruitment with SMS

Over 5 years into my career in HR and I still get the exhilarating rush when an interview with a candidate is about to start. I’ve always been a people person and each day I use that skill to make sure our company finds the best of the brightest talent!

We’ve been using SMS as a means of communicating with candidates for quite some time now and we look for more ways of implementing it in recruitment. Interestingly enough, using SMS for recruiting processes has actually proven very beneficial- not to mention that we use the company’s own product to impact its growth: that’s just genius!

Some of the options of how companies can use SMS in recruitment are:

As a Scheduler

Sometimes, the day can go by so fast that you feel like it slipped by you. One of the solutions to ensure the timely and proper invitation of a candidate is scheduling all the messages in advance so that the candidates receive reminders about their upcoming interviews. Think how beneficial it is from their perspective to be reminded not only about the interview they’re about to have but the thought that we take into each applicant.

In Surveys

A couple of months ago we were about to conduct our second internal survey and we’ve decided to try out SMS instead of the original email. The results actually surprised me: 17% more employees completed the survey in comparison to the first one. The same way we implement inviting candidates to post-interview surveys to find out how that interview went: there’s something about surveys that people just love taking.

Sending alerts and notifications

Posting vacancies and acquiring candidates is not a one-day task, so the more channels you send your invites to, the more options you will have in the end. So, to make sure that you get all the possible options before shortlisting candidates you send job alerts via SMS: remember that you may need an internet connection to send out SMS via the dashboard, but the receiver doesn’t and you can even include links for them to open applications on the spot.

I guess that at first glance it might be a strange notion for companies to communicate with a candidate via an SMS, but this recruiting strategy has been implemented and tested so many times that it’s already become a typical process. Even statistically speaking, the company gets an advantage if SMS is used for recruiting. Over 53% of candidates trust a company when it responds via SMS and 73% of job searchers favor targeted job opportunities via SMS.

Obviously, not every single step of the process should be achieved with SMS, it’s important to juggle the right and wrong. It’s never a good idea for instance to make an official job offer to the selected candidate via SMS; basically a text message.

But, let’s have a look at a few major factors of the advantages:

Access granted. Well, for starters even though the majority of people (if not pretty much every single human being on this planet earth) have mobile phones, however, not every one of them has a steady internet connection at all times. So, the fastest way to reach people and make sure your message is received is via text, not to mention that the highest open rate for SMS is 98% (keep in mind that email is only 20%).
Privacy is a priority. It goes without saying that security is of high priority for us and we have a state-of-the-art protocol in place that guarantees the privacy of anyone that is remotely or directly related to our product. It’s an absolute must to use SMS only with those candidates that actually give their permission and opt-in, remember that privacy and comfort is what SMS should entail.
Abundance is key. The technical aspect of SMS is so flexible and agile that you can select specific notions that would work best for you and the candidate. Opportunities from alerts, notifications, message personalizations to any extent, to locations and services are granted with our accessible omnichannel platform directly from the dashboard or with API integration.

Using business SMS for recruitment may seem like a job for the future, but that future is now. Recruiters understand the benefits and the better experience that the product brings to the table.