Following up on last year’s Arron Daniels guest post Texting While Sourcing, let’s take a closer look at texting in Sourcing and Recruiting.
Texting is about to become common practice in our industry. Job Candidate Preferences for Recruiter Text Messaging, a post by Brian Westfall, quotes as many as 60% of recruiters texting candidates. Unsurprisingly, most candidates under 25 years of age perceive texting as “professional”, while those older than 45 years don’t feel that way. Posts Can You Text Me Now? How To Leverage Text Messaging for Recruiting by Patrick Ward and Here’s How To Text For Success cover best practices in texting.
By all accounts, texting raises average candidate response rates dramatically, compared to emailing or leaving messages. Keeping in mind appropriate professional use of texting, how can we integrate it into our practice and use it efficiently? New tools such as TextRecruit promise to assist. But before we consider specialized tools, it would help to try easy – and not widely known – ways to manage texting outreach.
Did you know that it is possible to text by emailing, without using any additional tools? If we do so, we will be:
- Keeping track of emails and texts together, for message consistency and communication tracking
- Having a choice of a channel to reach out to a potential candidate
- Able to set reminders for follow-ups
- Mass-text when appropriate
Here is how texting by email works. If your recipients’ mobile carrier is AT&T, substitute the ‘number’ for the 10-digit cell number:
- AT&T: [email protected]
Similarly, for a few other popular mobile providers the templates are:
- T-Mobile: [email protected]
- Verizon: [email protected]
- Sprint: [email protected] or [email protected]
- Virgin Mobile: [email protected]
The email domains such as “txt.att.net” and “tmomail.net”, serving to receive texts sent by email are called “SMS Gateways”. Here is the most comprehensive list of SMS gateways I know of.
Of course, to find the correct email address, we need to know the mobile career for the given number. There are sites providing the information for free, for example, use freecarrierlookup.
SMS vs. MMS
Using texting by email, we need to understand the difference between “plain texting”, that allows to send a 160 character-long text at a time (SMS), and multimedia messaging (MMS). Mobile carriers accept either kind of messages via email, but the email domain is usually different for SMS vs. MMS. For example:
- Verizon (SMS): [email protected]
- Verizon (MMS): [email protected]
As always, we need to be considerate in the content and types of messages we send.
Sign up for the new webinar on Tuesday, November 15th (new date!) MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21st
Candidate Response Rates
to learn about easy-to-use tools for combining and optimizing messaging channels and improving candidates’ engagement.