Texting – A New Era of Recruitment Has Come

With the rise of the Millennial workforce, the time has come to reconsider the current ways of recruitment. Millennials bring a new set of attitudes and preferences that separate them from previous generations, and this is something that HR management has to adapt to. The changes require a new approach to recruiting talents quickly and effectively.

How to attract this new generation of people that spend most of their time with mobile phones in their hands, texting and checking notifications? The answer might sound simple – by being in their focus. We are talking about a new era of recruitment with texting becoming the most popular means of communication between recruiters and candidates.

Active Candidates vs Passive Candidates

Now, more than ever, we have to understand how talents approach the process of a career change. According to the latest research, almost 70% of the global workforce are passive candidates and only 30% are searching for a job actively, using their mobile phones mostly. Passive candidates don't have the patience for browsing the internet and visiting overcrowded job ad portals. What they do is search for companies with strong employer brands, seeing them as potential employers. How to attract those candidates and find perfect ones for your job position?

Active recruitment vs. passive recruitment

Companies are aware that the success of their businesses fully depends on hiring the right talent. The recruitment process is the first one to paint a picture of the company to a future employee. If poorly performed, it can actually scare the best candidates away.

We have different approaches to recruitment but most of them don't give satisfying results. It is well known that most companies recruit only when they need to. They usually need someone urgently, so there isn't enough time to find a perfect candidate. This approach is pretty unpopular among HR professionals but they understand why the companies do it – they have no resources (both time and money) to engage with candidates who will eventually not be hired at that moment.

How to make the process of recruitment constantly active and effective? Hard work doesn't pay off anymore. It is time to work smart. Instead of waiting for the right candidates to respond to our job ads, we need a way to approach them personally and make them interested in applying for our positions. SMS and other popular apps for texting seem to be quicker and more effective means of communication between a recruiter and a candidate.

Email vs. SMS

Email and a phone call were the only two channels of communication in the selection process for a long time. Are they efficient? The simple answer is NO, they are not. The response rate between email and SMS is huge. SMS open rates are about 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. On average, it takes 90 minutes for someone to respond to an email and only 90 seconds to respond to a text. So, why should we use emails as the official means of communication between the recruiter and candidates any longer?

Chat Your Job Platform

Why introduce SMS as a communication tool in the recruitment process?

• SMS has eight times the response rate of email.
• The communication between the candidate and the recruiter is faster and more effective.
• Most of the talent says that being contacted by their recruiter makes them accept a job offer faster.
• Candidates feel more respected when they are personally engaged in the recruitment process. They want to know the status of their application.
• Candidates see that addressing personally in text messages as a sign of respect for the effort invested.

With Chat Your Job recruiting becomes more proactive. A cloud-based database of candidates enables planning, forecasting, and understanding future role needs. You can determine what employees are needed before you actually have a job vacancy so that your hiring can shift to “just-in-time.”

Chat Your Job Platform Helps You Hire 70% Faster

About the author

D-Vision, a digital branch of DEKRA Arbeit Group, created Chat Your Job, a technical solution tailored to promote job openings to potential candidates using chat messaging apps like Viber, WhatsApp, SMS, or email. With the CYJ Platform, there are fewer stages in the recruitment process, which means that the recruiting process is reduced by 70%.