Ready to start texting candidates? Awesome, let's do this. 💪

Below are a 5 best practices to keep in mind to ensure you boost your response rates and have the best possible candidate experience. 

Local numbers help boost response rates, so be sure to pick an area code that's representative of the primary market you recruit in. We'll get you set up with a local area code during onboarding. 

Grayscale uses standard 10-digit phone numbers for texting (versus a 5-digit short codes) to keep your messages from looking spammy to candidates. 

Always make sure to introduce yourself in your first outreach to a candidate: 

"Hi Amanda! I'm Ty Abernethy, a recruiter at Grayscale."

Make sure to give context as to why you reached out: 

"I saw your resume on LinkedIn and was really impressed with your enterprise SaaS sales experience."

If this is a cold outreach to a candidate, the goal should be to start a conversation with the candidate, not to convert them to a phone interview or applicant with a single text. 

Start a conversation with a call-to-action like this: 

"Can I send you details of our sales manager role? If you're interested, I'd love to discuss further."

We recommend keeping your messages fairly succinct as a general rule. This is particularly true for the first "cold" message you send to candidates. 

The character limit for a single SMS message is 160 characters, however most modern phones and networks support concatenation and segment and rebuild messages up to 1600 characters.

However, for your first "cold" text to a candidate or group of candidates, keep within the 160 character limit. Some carriers may flag your message as spam if you send a lengthy cold text message to someone you've never texted before. 

Once the candidate responses, you can get a bit more verbose. Grayscale doesn't limit the number of characters for your texts, so feel free to expand your messages after a candidate has engaged. 

Phone carriers aren't big fans of people sending links in a cold text message (meaning the first message you've ever sent to a candidate). Their algorithms can flag this as spam, especially if the only thing you send is a link.

Try to avoid sending a job description in your first outreach -- instead, warm the candidate up first before sending. This ensures you avoid spam filters, but it also ensures the best possible candidate experience. 

While texting, make sure your messages are conversational in tone. That means, instead of obsessing over grammar and punctuation, start obsessing about communicating like a real human, in a conversational manner. 

Messages that are conversational in tone convert much higher than corporate, canned messages do. 

That said, we're not suggesting you be unprofessional or sloppy -- simply that you strive to communicate like a real human would while texting -- concise, conversational, and human.
​

Questions?
​Chat with us below for quick answers.