As a staffing firm, you know how hard it is to get a candidate’s attention. With the buzz of everyday life completely surrounding them, you’re constantly competing for their most valuable asset–time.
To be successful, recruiters must narrow the scope of the candidates they’re reaching out to and be sure their messages are appropriate for their audience. Nothing wastes your money faster than sending a text about a forklift operating position to 1,000 candidates when only 50 of them are qualified. If you’re going to implement text messaging into your recruiting process, you will want to do it right and with the help of an automated mass texting and calling system like Text-Em-All. From sending out job notifications to confirming interview times, these best practices will help shorten the hiring process, improve candidate engagement, and fill more jobs.
Best practice #1: Know what to send.
A good text message has 3 parts: sender identification, message information, and a clear call to action. Perhaps more importantly, you must remember to keep information brief. Each text should only cover one main topic (interview appointment time, etc.), especially if you require a reply from the recipient. Otherwise, ambiguity and confusion will cause issues.
Best practice #2: Make it personal.
If you’re looking to fill a job or shift quickly – personalizing your message is the key. Research shows that text messages with personalization can yield a 4%-12% better response rate. By simply inserting the person’s first name into a text, the opt-out rate is proven to decrease by 11%. Take this a step further by using personalization to quickly communicate different information to large groups, such as shift start times, locations, employer name, etc.
Best practice #3: Keep a professional tone.
You should avoid emojis, abbreviations, and other text elements that could harm the impression you are trying to create. It may be advisable to prevent capitalizing words and sentences too. When sending out text messages to candidates, be sure to spell check. Otherwise, it can leave a wrong impression, and some recipients might doubt whether the message is genuine.
Best practice #4: Schedule at the right times.
The best times to send messages are mid-morning between 10am–noon and mid-afternoon between 2pm–5pm. The rule of thumb is to avoid mealtimes because that’s when messages are most likely to be ignored. Of course, if your message is an emergency and needs to be sent right away, that’s okay. But if possible, the above suggestions will help get your messages heard that much more quickly.
Best practice #5: Clean up your contacts.
First, update your database and remove any phone numbers we report back to you as bad. Second, log in to yourText-Em-All account and go to “Broadcast Details” to export any non-reachable numbers to an Excel sheet. Next, upload this spreadsheet into your Opt-Out Report. Even if you forget to remove someone from your database or a colleague adds the phone number back in your ATS, our system won’t let you text that number. Also, Text-Em-All offers a custom automated report that pinpoints any “bad” contact numbers to help with cost savings and avoid wasted messages. Phone numbers that are included on this list meet the following criteria:
- Has never received a successful delivery receipt
- Messaging to this number has been attempted 3+ times
- There is a duration of > 30 days between the first time and the most recent time that we attempted to message this number
- Has never received a reply message (inbound)
Best practice #6: Enable the call-forwarding feature.
If you use an assigned toll-free text number from Text-Em-All, let us turn on call forwarding so that if anyone ever calls the number, we can forward the call to a phone line of your choice. Whether a candidate texts or calls you back, your team will receive it and remove any confusion.
Conclusion
Every staffing agency, staffing company, or staffing firm must pay extra attention to the company they partner with. Otherwise, some of the key features may not be possible.
Text-Em-All delivers a user-friendly platform that allows you to easily manage high volumes across multiple groups while also providing personalized attributes for job seekers. Using an automated messaging service like Text-Em-All helps minimize the work when it comes to filling jobs. You tell us who to contact and when, and we will send out your automated text message. Beyond that, you’re in complete control of the settings of your text messages. That includes personalization fields, message responses, and more.
Better still, we offer all of this at an exceptional price. Skip the job boards and take the first steps to gain a comprehensive service for texting job candidates and improving the hiring process by starting your free trial today!
Want to Learn More?
Click here to learn how Text-Em-All helps recruiting teams fill jobs faster or contact us at sales@text-em-all.com.
