Let’s Talk About Text

Maintaining direct and personal contact with your applicants throughout the hiring journey is an important part of the recruitment lifecycle. Leaving your applicants in the dark can impact your company’s reputation. So, how do you maintain strong, personalized communication with your candidates?

Why not leverage text messaging as part of your strategy?

Direct and tailored messages make things simpler on both the side of hiring managers and of potential candidates. And with so many unique forms of communication available today, there’s no excuse not to keep job seekers informed throughout the hiring process.

Utilize the Power of Technology to Produce a Better Hire

Smartphones are everywhere. In fact, smartphone penetration is up to 65% of the U.S. Market. However, this still leaves 35% of the market who are unable to access websites, career sites, etc on their phones. How do you then engage with these job seekers who are ‘offline?’

Let’s talk about text.

Did you know:

• 1.8 billion people are actively using SMS today, (Experian)
• Open/read rates for text campaign are over 95%, (comScore)
• Average time to open on a text message: 3 minutes, (mBlox)

This is a stark contrast to email campaigns, which yield an 11% read rate and can take over 384 minutes for a candidate to open.

SMS allows you to push tailored, relevant content directly to a candidate’s device of choice, using the frequency with which they opt to receive it.

How Do Employers Gather Candidate Consent?

Many employers may hesitate to consider SMS due to the U.S. Federal Regulations. Put simply, these regulations state that candidates must tell you, “Yes, I am happy to receive text message alerts from your company.” However, getting this type of consent is not as intimidating as it may seem.

There are several ways in which you can gain consent or opt-ins from your talent community to communicate directly to their devices. The simplest way is to utilize your careers site. Install a widget or registration form to gather the following (at the very least):

• Name
• Email Address
• Mobile Number
• Location
• Job Type / Category
• SMS Opt-In Checkbox

The mobile number is arguably the most important number you should be collecting from your candidate base.

Even if you have yet to initiate an SMS campaign, collecting mobile numbers and consent from your potential employees can provide a solid base to begin one in the future.

Mobile Campaigns Produce More Effective Communication

Overall, leveraging a mobile-based hiring strategy can reduce your time in reaching candidates, make recruitment more engaging, and provides many ways to automate the recruitment process.

About Loop

Loop operates a highly flexible and easily deployable enterprise mobile platform as a  Software as a Service (SaaS) product. The Platform is cloud-based and allows our clients to establish efficient mobile communication with their candidates, customers, and employees via the Loop integrated mobile web, private SMS messaging and IVR services.

Start today and utilize a mobile communication platform that enables you to contact job seekers via social media, mobile web, private SMS, and more. Keep in mind, building a mobile-enabled talent community is a process, but one which yields high, long-term results.