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Updated: July 2, 2025
When it comes to hiring, the phrase “communication matters a lot to your candidates” might be the understatement of the year.
This spring, just over half of job seekers surveyed told us that strong communication from recruiters (including speedy feedback and follow-ups) was one of three key factors that contributed the most to a positive candidate experience.
For talent acquisition (TA) teams, this probably raises questions about how to make gold-standard communication a reality. Especially because, as you might already know, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach!
When we think of communication with talent, we often think of email. The truth is that texting is an underrated and often underutilized channel for building relationships with applicants, educating them on your organization, and fostering connections that lead to great hires.
In this blog, we’ll run through some communication best practices, and outline how the best recruiting software can help even the busiest TA pro embrace them. And we’ll devote some special attention to making the most of texting as a channel for connecting with talent. Let’s take a look.
How can the Best Recruiting Software Support Candidate Outreach?
Let’s start by reviewing some general best practices and helpful norms to follow around communication with your candidates. Here’s how your applicant tracking system (ATS) can help you make those practices a reality.
- Make your rejections timely. When surveyed, the biggest chunk of candidates (over 40%) told us they’d prefer to hear back within 1-3 days if they don’t land a role. This makes sense, given that over half of candidates report having been ghosted at least once by a potential employer. You can avoid going the way of Casper and preserve your organization’s reputation at the same time by delivering a gracious, timely rejection.
- Keep in touch with nurture streams. This is a great way to curate a sustainable talent pipeline and avoid feast-or-famine situations where you’re scrambling to source candidates. Your software should help you create a pre-planned, regular series of messages to your talent pool. The right tools should also allow you to automate those sends, so that subscribers hear from you without you having to manually press “send” over and over.
- Use your data to improve over time. Nobody wants to feel as though their work isn’t having an impact. Relying on gut feelings instead of evidence also makes it tricky to measure your success. Show your internal stakeholders that it pays to keep in touch with talent by regularly checking your nurture stream conversion rates and optimizing your messages across channels. This will help you understand what’s driving subscribers to open and click through your messages, so you can deliver more of what works.
Why Should the Best Recruiting Software Help You Text Candidates?
People don’t just use their phones to text friends and family—they’re open to texting for other purposes, too. Text Request found that 83% of texts are read within 30 minutes, and 72% of respondents want to receive texts from businesses and other organizations.
Reaching candidates where they’re most accessible, on their phones, arms recruiters and hiring managers with a competitive edge. Here are three more reasons why your tools should be enabling you to text your candidates:
- Immediacy. Texting lends your messages an urgency that email just can’t match, making it a great channel for time-sensitive updates and reminders.
- Access to frontline workers. This year’s Job Seeker Nation report revealed that fully on-site workers are interviewing less than desk-based workers. One cause could be a lack of privacy or time to apply to jobs and schedule interviews during working hours. Texting can help solve these problems.
- No computer necessary. Answering a text doesn’t require candidates to sit down and boot up a computer—which is especially helpful if they don’t have reliable access to one. Put another way: Texting can actually help remove a structural barrier for candidates in the hiring process.
Finding the Best Recruiting Software for Texting Your Candidates
We may be a little biased, but we’re pretty proud of the way our texting functionality in JazzHR is built to help talent acquisition teams modernize the recruiting process. With JazzHR texting, you can connect with top talent faster—wherever and they are—right from your ATS.
How JazzHR Texting Works
There are three simple steps to texting your candidates from your JazzHR ATS.
- Add JazzHR Texting to your account, and install the Canvas extension (which powers this functionality).
- Head to any Candidate Profile.
- Start sending text messages!
Candidate responses will sync directly to the Candidate Profile for easy convo tracking. Want to text from your phone? Download the Canvas mobile app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
Get more info on our JazzHR Texting feature and discover how the best recruiting softwarecan elevate your recruiting and hiring through texting. Schedule a one-on-one demo with our team of experts today.
