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Here are today’s HR and workplace news headlines from Workology Go Podcast. I’m Jessica Miller-Merrell. The Workology Go Podcast is sponsored by HSA Bank.
Ep 6 – Trend Alert: Texting Job Seekers On the Rise
As the competition for great talent continues to heat up, text messaging provides recruiting teams a way to engage passive and active job seekers in a more personal way.
Gartner’s 2018 research shows that candidates open and read only about 20 percent of the emails that recruiters send via LinkedIn while texting platforms report response rates of 60 to 70 percent. For myself, personally, I’ve had job acceptances, interviews scheduled, and common candidate questions answer via text. The response rates from a staffing company client I worked with from Chicago were over 80%.
More on text messaging and its benefits is a snippet from an interview with 7 Media Group CEO, Ron Cariker. Ron’s company is a mobile and text messaging platform. He works with companies who are using text messaging not just for recruiting but also for marketing, sales, and list building.
“So I look at a text message like the subject line of an email and so it really puts a lot of emphasis on the marketers if they’re using e-mail marketing to make their subject lines much more compelling. But at the end of it all I think a lot of it is just the sign up process the opt out process the overall content that’s delivered. I think a lot of marketers fail on the email side to really you know hit the points that are necessary for that moment. They try to cram in their whole web site into their e-mail sometimes.
But you know texting is as simple as past the success when it comes to getting audience getting people to buy into it. So the learning curve is really small. Mm 10 year old is begging for a mobile phone but she knows how to text on an app that we’ve let her use internally in the house. But then I also text with my father who’s 67 years old. So it’s easy for everyone to adopt and learn. And it’s one of the first things most of us learn how to do when we get a mobile phone.”
Engagement
In addition to candidate engagement via text, some companies have begun using cloud-based reference checking solutions that allow job candidates and their references to communicate and facilitate reference check requests via text messaging. References who use a mobile device submit their feedback 18 percent faster than references who use a PC and there are even faster responses now that texting has been introduced, according to data from SkillSurvey. I like to think about how responsive I can be quickly over a text, however, like anything if I have too much on my plate, it gets lost in the deluge of my to do’s and daily life.
Text messaging offers great engagement, but only if we, as recruiters and TA leader use it wisely and don’t abuse it. I think about the response rates I use to get via LinkedIn InMails and messages in the past. This communication tool needs to be used responsibly and sparingly. Otherwise, we will have the same or lesser engagement levels than we’ve seen by InMail.
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Featured Story
Your Next Job Interview may Start with a Text
More Great Resources
What to Do When Recruiters Start Texting You
Ep 31 – Future of Mobile & SMS Text Messaging with Ron Cariker
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