Top 5 Text Recruiting Platforms

Adding text messaging to your recruiting strategy can help you connect with today’s top talent, strengthen your employer brand, and stand out from your competition.

Text recruiting is a form of communication that has notoriously high response rates, saves valuable time, and comes with loads of other benefits.

Text recruitment offers a simple way to communicate with job seekers at scale, while delivering the on-demand candidate experience they expect. And there are a lot of ways to use text recruiting, particularly in this competitive labor market. Employers can use text messaging to reduce abandon rates by connecting with job seekers who visited their careers site but didn’t complete an application. Recruiters can use text messaging to communicate with qualified candidates throughout the recruiting process, and when it’s combined with other communication methods, it can be part of a robust conversational recruiting strategy that attracts top talent, fills talent pools, and leads to strong relationships. 

Choosing a text recruiting platform to help you achieve your recruiting goals and fill your talent pipeline isn’t simple. But we’ll try to make it a little easier. Here’s a look at the top five vendors in the text recruiting space, listed in alphabetical order. 

Brazen

Brazen’s text recruiting service is part of its larger conversational recruiting suite, which also includes a recruiting chatbot, FAQbot, virtual career fairs, and online chat. Brazen clients are already seeing strong positive results that aligns with results from its other services. For example, around 80% of potential candidates who were given the option to transition from a chatbot conversation to SMS communication chose to do so. Fortunately, Brazen’s text recruiting tool integrates with its recruiting chatbot, live chat, and virtual events, making it even easier for candidates to communicate with their potential employer via the method of their choosing.

Brazen’s text recruiting service also includes sequencing or workflow. Sequencing allows talent acquisition leaders to set up text behaviors based on a candidate’s actions or inaction. For instance, it can be set up to automatically send a thank you message via text message after interacting with a recruiting chatbot (assuming the candidate opts for SMS communication). If the candidate doesn’t reply to that message, the text recruiting tool can automatically send a follow up message to help encourage engagement. 

Brazen will continue to build out the text recruiting tool to add more features to help employers have even more quality conversations with candidates. 

iCIMS / TextRecruit

TextRecruit was one of the earliest vendors in the text recruiting space and it was acquired by iCIMS in January 2018 but little has changed since then. Text recruiting is part of the mobile-first communication platform, which also includes live chat and an AI-powered chatbot. TextRecruit also includes internal texting tool for employees to communicate with HR and for teams to collaborate. Although the company offers a host of services, the TextRecruit product can be a standalone solution, an option that most other platforms don’t offer.

On average, TextRecruit users report a 37% response rate within 12 minutes. That’s much lower than the often-touted response rate of 80% or higher, but the speed of the response time isn’t typically reported along with that stat. 

TextRecruit is highly rated (4.5/5 stars on Capterra but even it can’t please everyone. Some reviewers complained that the ATS integration doesn’t port enough information, leaving them to devise other methods for populating their ATS. Other users criticized the canned reports as being too basic and expressed a strong desire for the ability to build custom reports. 

Jobvite Text

Jobvite is well known for its applicant tracking system, and began offering text recruitment in July 2018. Its text recruiting platform includes some valuable features, like mass texting, the ability to create scheduled messages, and sequenced messages that can be sent to multiple candidates at the same time. 

Alongside Jobvite’s chatbot, the text recruiting service prioritizes real-time conversations and standardizes your candidate communications. Jobvite always allows employers to track all text conversations and store the transcripts in the Jobvite candidate profile, getting more mileage out of the interactions.

While Jobvite has favorable ratings (4/5 stars on Capterra and G2), there are few mentions of its text recruiting service. Although the company’s reputation alone may be enough to convince some employers to jump on board, we would expect to see more customer feedback about the service now that it’s been on the market for over a year.

TextUs

While the above text recruiting platforms serve all types of employers, TextUs is primarily focused on staffing firm customers. It offers the features you’d expect, including mass text broadcasting and integration with an ATS. And TextUs claims the same high engagement rates we’re accustomed to seeing from other vendors in the space. Specifically, its users report a 98% read rate and a 40% response rate. 

TextUs is one of the highest rated text recruitment platforms (4.7/5 stars on G2 and 5/5 on Capterra) but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison with the other vendors on this list. That’s because TextUs has far fewer reviews than some of the other major players. Despite the overwhelmingly positive ratings, some reviewers complain that the system is slow and text delivery can sometimes be unreliable. Others say the mobile app is too basic.

Text me later! 

Once you consider the top text recruiting platforms, you may still have some questions about how to create a text messaging strategy that serves your overall recruitment goals. We recommend reviewing best practices and thinking about how text recruiting will work with your other communication channels before you decide on a platform. After all, you want to partner with a vendor whose recruiting software supports your needs, rather than having to retrofit your goals around their service offerings. 

Want more content on ways you can connect with candidates? Check out the options below!

Recruiting Chatbots: The Definitive Guide includes a look at top recruiting chatbot vendors and this post explores virtual career fair platforms.

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