Candidates are increasingly phone-centric so if you want to meet them where they are, that means using text surveys. Not text messages with links to web surveys, but conversational text surveys that can be completed in their messaging app.
According to Gartner, average text response rates are 45% vs 6% for email. Digital Marketing Magazine reports that 75% of people would prefer marketing offers sent to them via text. The case for the effectiveness of text messaging is clear. But if you are sending candidates a text with a link to a web survey, you’re taking them out of their preferred method of interacting and into another process that could kill your response rates. The key is to keep them in their app and conversation surveys do that.
Conversational Text Surveys
So what are conversational surveys? They are simply surveys with questions delivered one at a time within the candidate’s messaging app. The candidate responds to each question and is delivered each subsequent question until the survey is complete. Just like a text conversation.
It only makes sense that allowing candidates to submit their feedback within their messaging app would be the most effective way to get more of those amazing insights into your recruiting process that only candidates can give you.
The one caveat to the value of conversational text surveys is that it is a real time pursuit.
In other words, if you get your candidate feedback via periodic ad hoc surveys, texting may not be the best approach. The reason being that you are using a method that is all about immediacy to ask candidates about an experience that happened months ago. Many can’t remember and are no longer engaged with your company, so sending a text survey about a failed interaction from the past is much more likely to be seen as spam.
In the above case, a text survey is intrusive. You are commanding the candidate’s attention through a channel that is too intimate for the value the candidate perceives from the message.
Real Time Feedback Deserves a Real Time Channel
You see where I’m going here. In marketing (recruitment marketing, general market, etc.) channels matter. You have to match the type of message or offer you are sending to the appropriate channel, whether that’s email, LinkedIn, TV, etc. Each channel has its own characteristics and audience expectations that must match your message.
Conversational text surveys are better suited for real-time feedback with candidates who are engaged in the hiring process because they are waiting to hear from you. They want to provide you with more information and want to interact more with your company.
Real time feedback is typically collected after each important candidate interaction like phone screens, interviews, offers, etc. These surveys are triggered by stages in your ATS. This enables you to send short, relevant surveys that can be completed easily. Your ATS knows who the candidate is, what job they applied for, who their hiring manager is and more. So all you need to ask about is what happened in the interview, not what job they applied for or which office they visited or how the application process went or what stage of the process they are in.
Conversational Text Surveys and Real Time Feedback Are a Potent Combination
Survale provides real time feedback and now delivers conversational text surveys to candidates after each key step in the hiring process. That means more responses and more invaluable feedback that can uncover weaknesses in the hiring process. Weaknesses that are suppressing candidate satisfaction and hurting hiring results. And these insights can be put into practice immediately, not months after the fact.
The recruiting world continues to demand faster, more candidate friendly processes and more immediacy for organizations to achieve their hiring goals. Conversational text surveys are an important step in that progression.
