Be The Match is a non-profit organization with a mission to save lives through cellular therapy. They match people who have been impacted by blood disorders such as leukemia and sickle cell anemia with selfless bone marrow donors. They have the largest bone marrow registry in the world and connected over 7,000 patients and donors in 2022 alone.
With more than 1,500 employees, Be The Match is constantly looking for great talent who can help progress their mission forward.
“Our goal is to be a best-in-class talent acquisition organization,” says Kari Elias, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager at Be The Match. “And to do that, we knew we needed to revisit our overall candidate experience and hiring and onboarding strategies, which took us down the path of text messaging.”
Kari recently joined Sense for a webinar to share how her team is leveraging text messaging to reach more candidates, increase response rates, and streamline the end-to-end hiring process.
“Early in my career, I learned that candidates just want to hear back from recruiters,” says Kari.
Most recruiters do their best to consistently communicate with candidates. But with so many roles to fill and different candidates at different stages of the hiring process, it’s difficult to respond to everyone in a timely manner.
Be The Match uses Sense to send automated updates and reminders to candidates via text – helping them meet their goal of delivering an outstanding talent experience. As Kari says, “Candidates are much happier when they hear from you more frequently.”
Be The Match’s use of text messaging extends all the way to their onboarding phase. Their policy is that new hires have three days to fill out their I9 Form but have found that it was challenging for some people to meet that tight deadline. With the help of automated text message reminders, more candidates are completing their forms on time, starting the onboarding process on a positive note.
Be The Match uses text messaging to reach more candidates and progress them through the hiring process faster than ever before. When a candidate applies for a role, they instantly receive a text message prompting them to schedule an interview. Sense integrates with the hiring team’s calendars and collects and shares available dates/times for the candidate to meet the team.
By eliminating the back-and-forth email exchange between the recruiter and candidate, Be The Match is able to schedule more interviews in less time. Kari estimates that they get about a 90% response rate to these text messages and it takes less than a half hour to get an interview on the books after a candidate applies.
“Our hiring managers are happy because they’re meeting more candidates and our talent acquisition team members are happy because candidates are responding faster,” says Kari. “Overall, it has been a better experience for everyone involved and we’ve truly streamlined our processes.”
Kari’s team also leverages Sense text messaging to proactively source passive talent. They use mass texting campaigns to invite candidates to the different job fairs they participate in. This has helped drive attendance to these events and encourages candidates to seek out the Be The Match representative and have a conversation about joining the team. “We bring a lot of people to our job fairs and the interest we get is always pretty significant,” says Kari. “So much so that we are getting additional hires.”
Some recruiters are resistant to adopting text messaging as a candidate communication channel after relying on phone and email for so long. Kari was able to overcome this challenge by providing Sense training and sharing the successes of early adopters with the wider team.
“The minute people started using Sense and seeing how much easier it made their life, it was very easy to get them to adopt it,” she says.
Kari also found that using data to prove the effectiveness of texting went a long way in getting her team to embrace it. “Texting is the number one way people communicate and we see higher engagement from talent when we text them.”
By sharing those insights with her team and helping them understand that texting drives higher response rates and reduces time-to-hire, she was able to get everyone on board with text messaging in Sense.
Introducing a brand new candidate communication channel can be challenging. But in the case of text messaging, it’s well worth the time and effort since it benefits both candidates and recruiters.
Let’s conclude with a few tips that will help your talent acquisition team make text messaging the primary way you engage talent:
Using Sense to engage talent via text messaging has helped Be the Match meet their goal of becoming a best-in-class talent organization. If you want to learn more best practices for mastering candidate text messaging, check out our ebook “Texting for Talent: How Text Messaging is Transforming Candidate Engagement”.
