With the rise of mobile phone usage over the past few decades, text messaging has quickly become a cornerstone of a successful recruiting strategy. Given that it’s an emerging communication channel, new rules and regulations are being introduced to protect candidates from invasive and spammy texts.
Recruiters must be aware of the requirements set by regulatory bodies and carriers before launching a mobile recruiting strategy. Failing to follow their rules can lead to penalties, fines, deliverability issues, and a poor experience for potential hires.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what you need to know to ensure a compliant text recruiting strategy, along with best practices for creating engaging and effective candidate texts.
Before we get into it, a quick disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. Sense recommends consulting with your legal counsel to understand how federal, state, and local laws affect your business.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requires organizations obtain prior express written consent before sending marketing or solicitation texts. A clear and transparent opt-in process ensures candidates are receptive to your SMS communications. While there is an ongoing debate on whether TCPA applies to recruiting texts, it’s best to err on the side of caution and obtain consent from candidates.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continuously updates regulations to adapt to technological advancements and changing communication practices. As of October 2024, there are two pending FCC updates that are set to impact candidate texting:
The era of unregistered SMS has come to an end. Hiring organizations that use mass texting campaigns must register their numbers with specific regulatory bodies to be compliant with anti-spam laws.
This registration process will help carriers identify legitimate businesses and prevent fraudulent messaging. Failing to register your number can result in messages being blocked or filtered by carriers, preventing recruiting texts from reaching candidates.
Local long numbers must be registered with the 10DLC (Ten-Digit Long Code) program, which is managed by The Campaign Registry. 10DLC registration is required to send business-to-consumer messages using standard phone numbers.
Toll-free numbers require registration with the Verified Toll-Free program. Completing the process ensures your toll-free number is associated with your organization and recognized as legitimate.
Shortcodes (5 or 6-digit numbers) require a lengthy application process and carrier approval before use. The process is stringent because shortcodes are commonly used for high-volume messaging, and carriers want to ensure that businesses using them understand and comply with all regulations.
In addition to federal and state regulations, mobile carriers and aggregators have their own rules that hiring organizations must follow. Since they act as the bridge between recruiters and candidates, adhering to their guidelines is essential. Failing to do so can result in messages being blocked or filtered, which severely impacts deliverability.
Carriers and aggregators monitor and inspect all business-to-consumer text messaging to detect spam or non-compliant patterns. Their goal is to determine that messages come from legitimate sources and that proper consent has been obtained. If traffic appears suspicious, carriers can block or filter messages to protect recipients.
Carriers have full control over whether your messages reach candidates. Factors like content, volume, and the sender's reputation influence deliverability. Even if your messages comply with legal regulations, carriers may still block them if your practices don’t align with their policies (don’t worry, we’ll cover messaging best practices later in this blog post).
Your brand's trust score plays a crucial role in determining how effectively your messages reach candidates, especially with major carriers like T-Mobile. This score—assigned by carriers—reflects the overall credibility and compliance of your messaging practices and influences both the volume and speed at which your texts are delivered.
Trust scores range from 1-100 and are based on factors like message content, past compliance, and spam complaints. This score directly impacts how many messages you can send each day and how smoothly they pass through carrier networks.
Hiring organizations with a high trust score can send up to 200,000 message segments per day to T-Mobile subscribers. This high threshold greatly impacts your ability to communicate with a large candidate pool. It also indicates strong compliance with carrier guidelines, ensuring your messages aren’t flagged or filtered.
Conversely, hiring organizations with a low trust score are limited to sending as few as 2,000 messages per day to T-Mobile subscribers. This restriction occurs because carriers perceive a low brand trust score to be a higher risk of non-compliance or spam-like behavior.
In addition to impacting daily message limits, your trust score also impacts throughput—the speed at which your messages are delivered. A high trust score allows you to send around 75 messages per second per major carrier, which can total up to 225 messages per second across all major carriers.
In contrast, lower trust scores reduce this rate significantly, slowing your communication and potentially delaying candidate engagement. These limitations can significantly impact recruiting at scale, making it crucial to maintain a high trust score to drive a fast and efficient hiring process.
Effective candidate text messaging requires achieving compliance, deliverability, and personalization to create meaningful engagement. By adhering to best practices, you can ensure your messages reach the right people at the right time, while also maintaining legal compliance.
Getting clear consent from candidates before sending recruiting texts is not just a legal requirement, but also goes a long way in building trust.
Why it matters: Consent makes candidates aware of the communications they will receive, helping them feel respected during the recruiting process. In addition to protecting your organization from legal risks, consent promotes better candidate engagement, as people who willingly opt-in are more likely to respond positively to your messages.
Taking steps to write compliant messages ensures candidates are fully informed and helps your texts pass through filters.
Why it matters: Crafting compliant messages helps you stay within legal guidelines while also improving message deliverability. Clear, relevant, and compliant recruiting texts reduce the chances of your messages being marked as spam and get the attention of candidates.
Giving candidates the ability to opt out of text communications is not only required by law but also a respectful way to accommodate their preferences.
Why it matters: Honoring opt-outs is essential for maintaining trust and avoiding legal issues. And from the candidates’ perspective, easily being able to opt-out puts them in control of their experience, which improves your brand’s reputation.
Sending the right number of candidate texts at convenient times of day prompts responses and helps avoid spam filters.
Why it matters: By optimizing when and how often you send messages, you can improve your response rates while preventing candidates from feeling spammed or overwhelmed.
Personalization in text messaging helps capture candidates’ attention and build toward a more meaningful connection.
Why it matters: Personalized messaging builds rapport and makes candidates more likely to engage. This approach also helps you stand out in a crowded inbox by demonstrating that your message is tailored to the recipient, not just part of a generic blast.
Regularly monitoring your candidate text messaging performance is key to understanding what works and what doesn’t.
Why it matters: Tracking performance helps you refine your candidate text messaging strategy. Constantly monitoring relevant metrics and making necessary changes improves engagement and deliverability.
Leveraging automated tools to manage compliance saves time and reduces errors—all while giving you peace of mind that you’re adhering to regulations and carrier rules.
Why it matters: Automated tools reduce the risk of compliance oversights. Taking advantage of these solutions allows you to focus on building candidate relationships without worrying about the specifics of regulatory requirements.
Crafting the right message can be the difference between a quick dismissal and ultimately making a great hire. Candidate text messaging is all about building rapport and making each interaction feel personal and relevant. Thoughtful, targeted texting helps you capture and maintain candidate interest throughout the hiring process.
Clear and concise messages—that feel like the ones we’re accustomed to receiving from friends and family members—are far more likely to grab a candidate’s attention.
Why it matters: Strong messages move the relationship in a positive direction. Concise, well-structured messages are less likely to trigger spam filters and more likely to generate positive responses.
Moving beyond one-way communication helps create a more engaging and interactive messaging experience for the candidate.
Why it matters: We’re all accustomed to having a two-way dialogue in text message conversations. Engaging communication makes candidate text messages feel natural and conversational.
Tailoring your messaging content to align with what candidates want and expect contributes to a positive overall hiring experience.
Why it matters: Tailored content improves engagement by showing candidates that you understand who they are and what type of messages they want to receive. The result? Candidates are more likely to respond positively to your outreach.
Incorporating multimedia—such as images, videos, and GIFs—makes for more dynamic and interesting candidate text message content.
Why it matters: Multimedia makes your candidate text messages more compelling. Including a variety of content helps your messages stand out and allows you to convey information that goes beyond written text.
When crafting candidate texts, small details make a big difference in how your messages are received and delivered. Choosing the right words and symbols (and excluding the wrong ones) ensures your texts avoid carrier filters.
Certain words or phrases can trigger spam filters. It’s important to avoid using high-risk terms to prevent deliverability issues.
Similar to trigger words, certain special characters can also get the attention of spam filters, especially when used excessively. Being mindful of which characters not to include in your candidate text messages helps avoid unnecessary filtering.
Including links and contact information in your messages can be useful, but it’s important to do so in a way that doesn’t trigger spam filters.
Emojis and other non-keyboard characters can add personality to your messages. However, excessive use can also cause your messages to be labeled as spam.
While mass texting is a great way to share an open role with a group of qualified candidates, sending large volumes of messages in short succession increases the likelihood of texts being filtered or blocked. Following best practices mitigates this risk and ensures that your messages are successfully delivered.
First and foremost, recruiters should avoid "carpet bombing" campaigns—meaning sending generic messages to a broad audience to fill an urgent position. Instead, segment your audiences and personalize your candidate texts. This approach helps you contact only candidates who would be interested in the role and send texts that feel as if they were written specifically for them.
Even more, you should only rely on mass texting campaigns when sourcing for high-volume hiring efforts. If you’re hiring for only a handful of roles, focusing on targeted, personalized outreach will yield better results. Doing so allows you to craft messages that reference specific job details relevant to each candidate and highlight their background or previous interactions you’ve had.
Text messaging is a powerful way to engage candidates at every stage of the hiring process. Whether sourcing talent, scheduling interviews, or keeping candidates updated, text messaging provides a direct channel for connecting with the people you hope to hire. Let’s explore how recruiters can integrate text messaging into their hiring strategy:
As we covered, recruiters who need to quickly source a large number of candidates can create mass texting campaigns targeted at qualified prospects in their database. It's important to segment send lists to contact only relevant candidates and use templates with placeholders to personalize messages.
When a candidate responds and shows interest, recruiters can smoothly transition to a two-way conversation, providing the information each candidate needs and encouraging them to formally apply.
Text-to-apply enables candidates to easily apply for jobs by texting a dedicated number. An AI-powered chatbot collects application details by asking a series of simple questions and automatically enters the information into the ATS. This feature is particularly useful for retail, restaurants, and other businesses that advertise hiring in physical locations open to the public.
Automated, text-based screening and AI interview scheduling further streamline the hiring process. After the application stage, the AI chatbot continues the conversation—asking screening questions and presenting available interview slots if the candidate is qualified. The chatbot will also handle rescheduling requests and send automated text reminders to reduce no-shows.
Recruiting automation sends text messages that keep candidates informed with updates, reminders, and check-ins throughout the hiring process. If they reply, an AI chatbot will answer their questions in real-time, providing a conversational, human-like experience while keeping them up to date on their status.
Once a candidate accepts an offer, recruiters can use text messaging to start the onboarding process. Messages can include links to paperwork and important first-day details. Automated texts leading up to the start date help new hires prepare and get excited about their new job.
A comprehensive Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) platform offers various features to execute and enhance a candidate text messaging strategy. An AI-powered platform streamlines communication, helping recruiting teams collaborate, engage candidates across channels, and track messaging performance. Key features that can elevate your strategy include:
Shared inboxes centralize candidate text messages and allow the entire recruiting team to view them. Recruiters can step in when a colleague is unavailable or review the messaging history to avoid duplicate outreach. Conversations can be color-coded and filtered by type (e.g., mass text vs. one-on-one), making it simple to manage candidate engagement.
Messaging templates help recruiters send consistent, personalized, and on-brand texts that capture candidate attention. Templates can be A/B tested to identify the most effective content and calls to action. Placeholders within templates are automatically filled with relevant details—like the candidate’s name, location, and job title—ensuring every message is personalized.
AI-powered chatbots eliminate wait times by instantly responding to candidates, answering questions, and automating tasks like screening and interview scheduling. These 24/7 recruiting assistants create a seamless candidate experience while reducing the manual workload for recruiters.
While U.S.-based candidates typically prefer SMS, WhatsApp is popular among global candidates. A CRM allows recruiters to connect with candidates on both platforms and cater to individual communication preferences. This multi-channel approach expands the talent pool and maximizes the effectiveness of candidate text messaging campaigns.
An AI-powered messaging generator automatically creates text content that aligns with your brand’s tone and style. AI-generated messages follow best practices to maintain compliance and are optimized for response rates and deliverability.
Messaging analytics offer valuable insights into candidate engagement. Interactive charts and dashboards track trends and performance, helping recruiters refine their text messaging strategy for better results.
The Sense AI-powered Talent Engagement Platform provides all the features needed to deliver a mobile-first candidate experience. We’ll also connect you with our team of experts who stay up to date with the latest regulatory developments and trends and will help you build a compliant and engaging text messaging strategy. Get in touch to learn more.
