10 Reasons Why Recruiting via Instant Messaging Is Fundamental
Here are 10 reasons supporting the importance of instant messaging in attracting potential candidates:
- They are everywhere. Everyone has a messaging application on their smartphone – including all of your candidates. You only need to find out what they use.
- Reach. Most of the popular messaging applications already have a vast user population (iMessage, Twitter, WhatsApp, Messenger, Hangouts, Snapchat, WeChat or LinkedIn messages), negating the need to create it from scratch.
- Agility. Since all messengers are natively mobile, they all support push notifications. The only reason why a user won’t immediately see your message on their smartphone, even when it’s locked, is if they have disabled the push notification service for each and every one of the messaging apps.
- Time to respond. It’s so easy nowadays to reply to an instant message; all it takes is a simple gesture on the smartphone’s screen and the miniscule amount of time to write back. It is far more likely for someone to reply to an instant message pretty fast, compared to sitting down on a computer and formally reply to an email.
- Perceptibility. There is large amount of users, mainly younger in age, that either don’t actively use their email – which they only made because they were required to by Apple or Google for their services – or only use on-demand, with no push notifications turned on. This could mean that emails, no matter how important, may remain unopened for more than they should.
- Messages with multiple functions. Most messaging applications incorporate additional functionality, e.g., voice and video calls, photo and file sharing, etc. This means you can exploit several ways to attract candidates, depending on the app they use. WeChat, for example, supports gaming, offers access to city services, calling for a taxi, buy tickets and even fill job applications, offering unmatched recruitment options.
- Threaded discussions. This is immensely important for both sourcers and job applicants to follow discussions from beginning to end, for the right opportunity. The message thread is always present, accessible and ready-to-add to by both parties on-demand. Moreover, if you don’t erase them locally, the threaded messages are available for future reference, should anyone want to pick up on the conversation. This is mostly useful to candidates, because it gives them the ease of having all information available on a single place instead of several emails, many of which not easily accessible
- SMS use is extensive.Recruiters use SMS now more than ever, as a superb means of communication and reminding tool to job seekers. SMS is embedded in the majority of ATS systems, despite being basically an outwards method of communication. But this also means that stepping up to instant messaging should come as a natural evolution for recruiting officers
- It’s easy. It’s something each and every one of us does on a daily basis, using instant messaging to stay I contact with family and friends. We are proficient in the use of several messaging applications. Therefore, incorporating these into our work would require almost no training, making them immediately ready to use.
- Worldwide. Instant messaging is literally worldwide; no barrier exists to limit their use. Applications such as WhatsApp, Hangouts, Messenger or WeChat are used by people GLOBALLY. So, you don’t have to make any adjustments to use them across countries, every person on both sides uses exactly the SAME systems, wherever they are.