In any industry, reducing the average time to hire is important for maintaining a steady bottom line. Text messaging can help.
Rushing through interviews may lead to unqualified candidates slipping through the cracks. Text messaging via SMS API integration can reducing the time it takes to engage with talented professionals and help find the best candidates faster.
Drawing skilled workers from a predefined talent pool is one of the best ways to decrease time to hire, because you already know and trust the people within the community. However, developing the talent community is the hardest part of hiring.
With SMS technology, you can improve engagement with otherwise unresponsive candidates through text messaging and quickly act on leads as they mature.
Building Talent Communities with Text Messaging
Networking is just as valuable for recruiters as it is for job seekers. The best recruiters are always establishing connections that branch out into online and in-person channels.
A talent community is a group of passive job seekers that recruiters have contacted through social media, or cold calling. Most talent communities are tenuous at best, because recruiters lack the time and resources to keep this amorphous address book up-to-date. Additionally, talent communities are susceptible to competing engagement efforts. Without constant attention, talent communities may break apart due to competing forces.
With the right technology, however, recruiters can leverage their talent communities into active resources for top-tier workers. Connecting to a SMS Gateway gives you an automated solution to reach targeted professionals via a simple text message.
How to Use Text Messaging to Engage Talent
According to an ERE Media study, roughly 60 percent of recruiters use text messaging to contact recruits. In addition to person-to-person communications, recruiters rely on text messaging services to automate screening questions in batches during the qualification process.
"Text messages have a 98% open rate."
That's just one use for SMS technology. Engagement levels have the potential to spike when a recruiter implements an SMS Gateway connection integrated directly into their recruitment platform. According to Mobile Marketing Watch, text messages have a 98 percent open rate compared to a 22 percent open rate for marketing emails. Speed of communication improves as well. Online marketing expert Jamie Turner reported that the average response time for a text message is 90 seconds, compared to 90 minutes for emails.
Today's professionals are never far from their smartphones, which makes texting a quick path forward for recruiters. For instance, if an open positions appears just right for a particular candidate, the recruiter can quickly reach out with more certainty that their message will be received, read and acknowledged.
Optimizing Talent Resources
Specifically, recruiters can improve engagement and talent follow-through by texting interview reminders ahead of each appointment. This will help prevent no-shows and reduce the need to reschedule. Then, on the day of the meeting, you can automatically send location and time details to ensure punctuality.
Plus, recruiters can refer back to text conversations to aid their memory for specific details. So even when the conversation has lagged, recruiters always know where to pick back up. This would be impossible to achieve with a telephone call.
In sum, connecting a SMS API to your recruitment platform can improve your data collection, while stabilizing and optimizing talent communities. It allows you to leverage texting as a tool to build your talent pool database. Properly integrated with an SMS API, text messaging increases engagement levels, betters use of time and resources and best of all, reduces time to hire. These benefits are all within reach if you implement a texting strategy properly with a reputable SMS Gateway provider.
