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The Benefits of Recruiting Candidates with Text Messaging

Where is your phone right now? I know it’s kind of a weird question for a recruiting blog, but humor me for a moment. I can tell you where mine is. It’s less than 6 inches from my laptop and face up. In fact, it probably never leaves my side at all during the day. I don’t know if it’s separation anxiety or just an unhealthy dependency, but I find that I can’t be away from it for too long without feeling disconnected and honestly a little lost.

I’m not alone. For years now, people have developed deeply personal relationships with their phone. In fact, the average person checks their phone an average of 150 times a day. For perspective, think of it this way. Assuming the average person gets 8 hours of sleep a night, this means they check their phone approximately every 6.5 minutes throughout their day.

While this may be a little unsettling and possibly even frustrating when you are trying to have a conversation with a chronic phone checker, texting presents an amazing opportunity for recruiters.

The Benefits of Texting

People are Glued to their Phones

Without spending too much time repeating myself, people are attached to their phones with over 90% of people admitting they always have their phone within arms reach. With recruiters struggling to find new, innovative ways to get their opportunity in front of candidates, why not bring the opportunity directly to them in a place where you know they won’t miss it?

Alerts Right on the Screen

Unlike email which often gets buried along with the hundreds of others in our inbox, text alerts appear right on our screens. Even if the candidate doesn’t see the message immediately when it comes through, it will still be there once they inevitably grab for their phone, making sure that your opportunity stays top of mind.

Builds a More Personal Candidate Experience

Recruiters today are tasked with building more personal, tailored candidate experiences. Although email and InMails are two of the best resources in a recruiter’s arsenal, candidates are getting bombarded with messages through these channels each and every day. At the moment, text is relatively untapped and immediately creates a more personal and conversational feel to your outreach.

Faster Candidate Response Times

Compared to other alternatives, texting has on average the fastest response times. A text is shorter to digest, harder to avoid, and are overall more convenient. Text eliminates the barriers to reply that are commonly associated with traditional channels of communication and can help speed up the recruitment process.

Smaller Time Investment

Email can be challenging. First, there is the subject line. You have to write something compelling and personal while communicating value in <X> characters or less. Then, comes the tall task of the message. You have to do everything you did in the subject line but at a much larger scale. You can easily lose half of your day trying to write the perfect message. Texts are beautifully simple. With a few brief words, you can capture everything you wanted to say in an email in a fraction of time.

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