Survey Results - Text Recruiting in 2018 (Part 2)

Welcome to Part 2 of the results from our survey about candidate text messaging that covers areas such as emoji use, technology preferences, ATS integrations, and group text campaign features. This is a follow-on from Part 1 that digs into the motivations of why recruiters are choosing (or not choosing) to use text messaging to engage with candidates in 2018. If you missed Part 1 then you can find it here.


The Survey:

We asked recruiters to spend 2 minutes to answer 10 questions about their use of text messaging with candidates. The questions covered topics such as their preferences (and reservations) about texting, the technology they use, why they do/don’t prefer to text, their use of emojis, ATS text message integration, and group text campaign functionalities. If you’d like to take the survey yourself you can find it here.

The Sample Size:

We surveyed over 200 recruiters in North America with the majority of respondents coming from the Pacific Northwest broken into roughly 50/50 external vs internal recruiters:




With over 500,000 recruitment professionals in North America we realise that our sample size is small, however it revealed some interesting insights:


Survey Result: 70% of recruiters who text are using a mobile handset to text with candidates.



This was no surprise to us because everyone is carrying a cell phone these days and for most recruiters it’s the only option they have if they want to send texts to candidates. We were surprised however to see that desktop and web browsers messaging apps such as WhatsApp Web, iMessage, and Android Messages (listed under ‘Other’) were the by-far the second most popular platform for texting with candidates. This suggests to us that recruiters see the value in being able to send text messages directly from a computer.


Survey Result: 88% of recruiters who text send between 1- 10 text messages per day.



This was the most definitive statistic of the survey and we were expecting that we would see a higher number of average texts sent per day than 10. We deduct the reason for this low number is primarily due to two main factors:

  • Almost all of the respondents recruit for white-collar, low volume roles.
  • 70% of recruiters are using a mobile handset (see survey result above) which aren’t designed for business-scale mass texting


Survey Result: Over 50% of recruiters are already using emojis when texting with candidates.



Emojis can be useful for adding tone and context to text messages but they’re still not widely considered ‘professional’ among the business community. We’ve noticed more emojis ‘sneaking’ into professional communication and we predict that this will continue, especially as more of Generation Z enters the workforce. Today, only 25% of recruiters surveyed never plan to use emojis when texting candidates, but we predict that will figure will be much lower next year as emojis become more accepted in business communication.


Survey Result: Only 43% of recruiters consider text messages being automatically logged in an ATS as ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ important.



We found this statistic very interesting as we didn’t have a prediction going in. The majority of our respondents don’t see a high value in ATS integration and we’re curious to dig deeper into this topic. We predict, however, that this would be a more important feature to recruitment leaders who would see more value in having messages securely logged in a central location and not losing valuable conversational data when a recruiter leaves their team.


Survey Result: 60% of recruiters would use group text campaigns if it was available to them.



The biggest challenge of using conventional text messaging to engage with candidates is the lack of scalability because you can only send 1:1 messages. We are solving this problem by making the ability to easily send personalised group text campaigns to your talent pools as a key feature of the Rectxt platform.


Key Takeaways:

Here are our main takeaways from the second part of the survey:

  • Because the vast majority of recruiters are using their personal mobile handsets to text with candidates, they are being restricted by the limited scalability capabilities of 1:1 messaging.
  • Emojis are already widely used by recruiters and this will be an increasing trend as a large portion of respondents admitted to being open to using them in the future.
  • The ability to scale out communication by sending 1:Many text messages via group text campaigns is an attractive feature to most recruiters.

Thanks for reading! - Brian & Brad

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