According to a survey conducted by Statista, by 2020, the number of smartphones worldwide had exceeded 3 billion and will continue to increase in the future. Thus, texting has become the most ubiquitous way of communication between people. To adapt to changes in the highly competitive recruiting market, talent acquisition leaders are steadily adopting text recruiting tools in their recruiting strategy.

However, a good tool alone can’t give you good results. If you are yet to meet your ROI even with a text recruiting app, there’s a chance that you are using this technology in the wrong way.

We at Rakuna would like to help you recognize the 6 common mistakes that can make your text recruiting tool a burden for your job. But first, let’s start with some definitions of text recruitment and text recruiting tools for those new to the terms.

What Is Text Recruiting?

Text recruiting is essentially communication via text messages between employers and their potential applicants. With text recruiting, recruiters can bring their candidates up-to-date with relevant job positions, recruiting events, and the recruiting process stages.

Text recruiting has become somewhat famous for the last few years as recruiting emails are now too saturated. With around 306.4 billion emails sent in 2020, your email can easily be lost in someone’s inbox. Text messages, however, can effortlessly grab people’s attention and indeed take less time to read. Hence, text recruiting caters to recruiters wanting to make a more private and engaging conversation with potential candidates.

Why Do You Need a Text Recruiting Tool?

For small businesses with limited recruiting resources, manually directing text recruiting strategies poses few problems. But for more major recruiting teams with larger talent pools, you most definitely don’t want to waste your time.

With the help of a text recruiting app, recruiters can send well-written mass messages or 1-1 texts to their candidates. A text recruiting tool can also generate invaluable analytics such as SMS reply or bounce rate. Recruiters can use these metrics to better candidate relationship management by only sending appropriate, personalized texts.

6 Common Pitfalls That Make Text Recruiting Tools a Liability

1. Sending Irrelevant Texts

There is a fine line between a great job opportunity popping up out of nowhere and a spam text message. No one likes spam emails and texts. In fact, that is a mutual waste of time and can lead to further consequences. Consider the possibility of losing your potential candidates if they finally decide to opt-out of your text recruiting program. So, remember to classify your potential candidates. They can be based on their career paths and interests. When you have to send mass messages, it will be easier for you to send targeted, appropriate information to the right group. Another tip to prevent regrettable irrelevance is to notify your text receivers of your company’s referral program. Even if your candidates somehow get the wrong texts, they would feel free to refer that opportunity to their circle of friends.

2. Sending Text Recruiting Messages Without Consent

Every business intending to use text recruiting should study carefully the text messaging laws of where they base. Sending text messages for any business purpose without permission is illegal in several countries. Taking the US as an example, The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) prohibits businesses from sending text messages to people without their consent. The CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) works somewhat similarly to the American counterpart, or even more strictly. It doesn’t allow any exemption but only valid written consent from text receivers. In the meantime, The PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) in the UK state clearly that people only receive marketing text messages if they have already given the text senders their consent.

However, these regulations allow text messages without prior permission. The catch is the related customers must have given their contact in previous purchases with the associated companies. Also, there must be an opt-out option for customers in this specific case. The best solution for you is to make sure you already have your candidates’ permission to message them. Some countries require explicit written consent, so your candidates may have to fill in forms on paper or online. Those documents will help your company avoid possible legal problems.

Here’s a little tip to get your candidates’ permission more efficiently: tell people that your team is advertising wonderful job opportunities by texts. You can publicly announce at recruiting events, your company website, online job boards. Then provide paper forms or a quickly accessible online form to get their consent. It’s even easier to put a QR code at those related places since people can just turn on their camera, have a quick scan, and be directed to the target form.

3. Being Unnecessarily Wordy

Texting your candidates is more or less similar to texting your friends. Speaking from your own experience, of course, you don’t fancy long, boring texts, especially the ones with unnecessary wording and not even trying to cut to the chase. Being flowery and lengthy in your recruiting SMS gets you nowhere.

The word limit for an SMS is 160 characters. So make sure you utilize them to make your candidates interested. Remind yourself to be always transparent and direct with short and exciting statements, and don’t forget a shortened URL to the main post. Once the text receivers are thrilled with the “appetizer,” they’ll be happy to click on the link for more information. Also, keeping your texts short enough will save your candidates’ effort to scroll down quickly for the link.

4. Sending Text Messages at Inappropriate Hours

Business texts sent at non-working hours often fail at grabbing text receivers’ full attention. People have other business outside of work too. Most candidates do not like to deal with work-related topics when they are relaxing. So it is unlikely to hook candidates late outside office hours.

Plus, candidates may think you have to work overtime when getting recruiting messages from your firm long after work hours. Of course, that doesn’t sound very attractive to people who are considering working at your company.

Recruiting texts will be most effective when being sent during office hours. Statistically speaking, about one-third of marketing text recipients prefer between 12:00 and 15:00 of the whole week. Nonetheless, we suggest not bothering your potential candidates on weekends. Your texts are more likely to be answered by candidates who are in their ‘work mode.’

5. High Text Sending Density Is a Problem!

Spamming your candidates with several texts a day is a big taboo in-text recruiting. Too much information for a short period might be showing that you’re pushing them through your process. One benefit of this recruiting method is to give your potential candidates more time to consider your messages.

To avoid spamming your candidates at inappropriate times, try to carefully plan the duration between each message using a text recruiting app. Most applications (including the one we offer at Rakuna) can help users better manage their SMSs through an optimized user interface or intelligent features such as scheduled sequences of text messages.

6: Using an Informal Register in Your Texts

Recruiters usually want to project a friendly atmosphere toward their candidates. The use of less-formal words and even emojis can achieve this. Nevertheless, don’t go beyond the line of professionalism and become inappropriately too friendly. Behaviors such as asking too private questions or using slang can make a recruiter come out as rude and insensitive. Giving the possibility that you will become co-workers one day, professionalism is more than ever a must. What you should do is to keep your texts translucent, without slang, abbreviations, or text lingo. Some say that you can’t use emojis. However, it doesn’t need to be that strict. You can consider using standard, simple emojis such as the winking face to make the text more friendly towards young candidates. However, keep the number of emojis down to one or two per message. More importantly, remember to ask only professional, work-related questions. If your candidates accidentally start to share more than enough about their private life, you should have the courage to ask them politely to get back to work matters.

Conclusion

All in all, text recruitment and text recruiting tools are good choices for your work if used properly. Having cutting-edge text recruiting software helps to automate your process and reduce manual workload. For candidates with good text communication, they will always know where they are in the recruiting process. Notwithstanding, those 6 common mistakes can be rather big obstacles when attracting potential applicants. With this article, we hope that you have an overall guideline to better your text recruiting process and candidate relationship management.

Images used in this post: Freepik

This blog post originally appears on Rakuna's blog.