SMS Campaigns for Recruiters
Part One
Modern recruitment professionals are navigating a challenging landscape. Most recruiters believe hiring has become more difficult than just a year ago. Recruiters, whether solo, in-house, or agency-based, are expected to identify, engage, and onboard top talent, often with fewer resources than before. However, there's a beacon of hope.
The adoption of business-class text messaging is surging across the recruitment sector. This intuitive communication medium is being leveraged to create SMS campaigns that can screen candidates, schedule interviews, send reminders, and maintain a continuous dialogue with a vast pool of potential hires, in a fraction of the time it would take to do it all manually.
Personalized Recruitment Campaigns
The best candidates know that the treatment they receive during the recruitment process will likely reflect the quality of the organization they are interviewing for. Basic personalization like incorporating a candidate’s name or acknowledging their unique skills and experiences can significantly enhance engagement. These types of personal touches in an SMS campaign are a signal to candidates that the recruitment team has done its due diligence and has adequate resources to plan ahead. Beetexting’s larger SMS campaigns, or Broadcast Campaigns, can be personalized to add exactly these types of personal details.
There's a notable difference in response rates between generic text messages and those that are tailored to the individual. By personalizing messages, recruitment agencies can make candidates feel at ease, leading to increased trust and rapport via SMS.
Recognizing Seasonality in Recruitment
Every industry has its rhythms, and recruitment teams must be prepared to dance to them all. By understanding the variable nature of specific job markets, recruitment agencies can tailor their messaging to align with these patterns. Whether it's addressing seasonal hiring needs or using Beetexting’s Broadcast Campaign feature to plan for peak hiring periods, recognizing trends is key.
By scheduling Broadcast Campaigns ahead of time, recruitment teams can have candidates ready to go even before hiring companies reach out about new opportunities. The ability to plan campaigns well in advance of client demand becomes even more powerful when paired with other Beetexting features like Tagging. With the holidays just around the corner, recruitment agencies can review their list of contacts for anyone tagged “retail,” “logistics,” or even “travel,” and start a keep warm campaign that will remind candidates that their customer service, support, driving, aviation, and logistics skills will soon be in demand to meet the intense need that the holidays create.
By analyzing the recruitment cycles of the industries they serve, recruiters can get ahead of the hiring rush, and use technology to create relationships with the candidates they’ll soon need to place in open roles.
Targeted Communication for Optimal Engagement
While personalization and technology can go a long way to making recruitment campaigns successful, SMS campaign's power lies in sending relevant messages to a very targeted audience for optimal engagement. Recruitment teams should make note of the “why” behind each text message sent and use tags to identify which contacts in their talent pool are the right audience for their message.
The pressure from hiring managers and clients to get high response rates tempt recruiters to send their message as broadly as possible. And while that may work at first, it quickly disengages an audience. Rather than sending to every contact in the business’s CRM regarding the latest six-figure role, recruitment teams should be thoughtful about who they send each message to, and why they are reaching out.
Like planning Broadcast Campaigns for each season, recruitment teams should think carefully about what each text message in a campaign will accomplish. While it is perfectly fine to use some texts to establish a relationship or collect information about the candidate, that purpose should be obvious.
In addition, more often than not, good business texts are singular in their purpose. Recruiters should not ask candidates to RSVP to a virtual recruitment event and send their resume all in one text message, as the texts will start to look like emails – which is exactly what good SMS campaigns avoid. Instead, recruitment teams should plan each campaign so that candidates receive concise, warm messages that help them move toward the finish line.
