5 Ways to Improve Your HR Process With Texting

5 tips for improving HR with texting presented in this article are based on real-life applications of SMS in HR. Texting can improve your communication with both your candidates and employees, and help you solve different HR challenges and achieve important HR goals.

Texting: A new trend in HR

Emails can be lost, making it hard to meet deadlines or get employees to participate in workplace events.
Meetings and phone calls are interruptive and time-consuming, often giving a wealth of information that isn’t well retained.

Text messaging can improve your HR communication both with your candidates and employees.

Text messaging has become an effective recruitment channel, especially when you are trying to hire Millenials, who prefer texting to communicate.

Sending SMS is also an efficient way to get the right information into the hands of your employees quickly, helping them get on board with policy changes, training information, HR deadlines, benefit specifics and more.

How can texting improve your HR processes?

There are a vast number of other ways texting can be used to improve HR processes.

The following 5 ways of improving HR with texting are based on real-life workplace applications of SMS in different HR areas.

Hopefully, these examples can serve as an inspiration to help you set up your own texting strategy. Remember, a smart texting strategy should always be personalized to the needs and audience of your company.

Texting in recruiting

Texting can be used in the full life cycle recruiting in many different ways, especially for encouraging candidate engagement and improving your overall candidate experience .

Texting allows you to send candidates additional information that is not available in your job postings published on your career site and job boards.

Another important use of texting in recruiting is conducting SMS candidate surveys. With the right candidate experience survey questions, you can get feedback from candidates quickly and efficiently and use gathered information for improving your candidate experience .

Contrary to popular opinion, texting doesn’t have to stop once a candidate gets hired. You can use texting to improve new hire onboarding and helping them transition quickly and smoothly.

Texting to schedule meetings

When you need to meet with employees to go over benefits, policy changes or training, you don’t want to waste your time with any miscommunication. In order to hold an effective HR meeting, first you need to schedule it in an efficient way.

Text messages can be set up to allow employees to automatically schedule meetings that fit into your calendar.

You can also set up automated meeting reminders and send out the address or building directions to help avoid any confusion that might delay the start time.

Texting to conduct employee surveys

HR can use SMS text to send out links to relevant HR surveys such as employee satisfaction survey, employee engagement survey and employee retention survey which will help you better understand what your employees are facing in the workplace.

Get to know what your employees think in a space that feels safe and convenient to them. Your employees will appreciate being part of the process to improve the policies and practices of your company.

Employees that feel respected are more likely to show a higher level of job satisfaction and feel a sense of loyalty to the company. Conducting regular employee survey is an important part of engaging and nurturing your talent in order to stop them from leaving your company.

Texting to educate about benefits

Benefits are very important, but often neglected component of your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). One research says that 85% of employees are confused about their HR benefits.

You can tackle that issue with texting. When you send links to benefit signup forms, deadline reminders and relevant updates, you can check to see who is clicking-through.

You can also text out interesting facts about the benefits to help pique the interest of your employees and get them to look into exactly what is available to them.

Texting to reduce the stress of payroll

Paydays can be stressful, especially around the holidays. Text messaging can be used to send out quick reminders to help keep employees in-the-loop on what they can expect from unusual payday dates.

You can remind employees to fill out their timesheets, give deadlines for submitting expense sheets and send out direct deposit notifications.

You can even allow employees to text in any payroll discrepancies they may have so that problems are both recorded and noted immediately for your follow up.

About guest author

Joel Lee is the SEO marketing specialist at Trumpia, which earned a reputation as the most complete SMS solution including user-friendly user interface and API for mobile engagement, Smart Targeting, advanced automation, enterprise, and cross-channel features for both mass texting and landline texting use cases.