You just sent your top candidate an email inviting them to another interview or extending them an offer letter but it gets buried beneath Twitter notifications, package delivery notices, and deal alerts. The candidate doesn’t see it soon enough and moves on to another offer. If only there was a better way to reach candidates more directly!
The good news is that there is — texting. The average American checks their phone about 344 times a day, making text messages about 85% more likely to be read. With increased likelihoods of getting your hotel recruiter’s top candidates to read messages from them, you’re ultimately increasing your hotel’s hiring velocity.
It may seem daunting at first to think of the many ways that text messaging can be used in your hotel’s hiring process, but there are so many benefits to it as well. Aside from being read more often than emails, texting allows you to eliminate inefficiencies in the interview process to save your HR department — and candidates — time.
However, text messaging not only helps your hotel streamline your hiring process to decrease time-to-hire; this channel of communication helps your hotel stand out in the sea of potential employers vying for their attention. Texting is a tool that, if used correctly, can greatly enhance your candidate experience — and help you win top talent before your competition even has a chance.
There are so many ways that your hotel could utilize text messaging capabilities to speed up hiring that it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that is guaranteed to solve every hotelier’s needs, Hireology came up with this list of five ways that texting hospitality top talent can help you hire faster.
Reach out to former candidates
If your recruiting team follows a standardized interview process, they have a catalog of former applicants that they felt didn’t exactly match the positions they applied for or chose to accept offers elsewhere. Instead of letting that data collect figurative dust on a server, use it to your advantage to fill open positions at your hotel.
When your HR department uses interview guides where your team can input individual notes about applicants — including why they were skipped for certain positions — you have all the information you need at your fingertips to turn their applications into hires. Odds are that the candidate was interested in working at your company, but for one reason or another was disqualified for certain positions. Or if they accepted a role elsewhere and enough time has passed, they may be ready for a different job.
The best news about this tactic?
You keep your word when you tell rejected candidates that you are keeping their application in mind for other positions better suited for them. When they receive a follow-up text from you, seemingly out of the blue for them, it demonstrates that your hotel truly valued the time they spent interviewing with you. Not only that, but the text message shows that your recruiting team wants to set new employees up for success in their hospitality roles — a sentiment that greatly improves your candidate experience.
Reemphasize your employee benefits
If you thought marketing your open roles ended on your career site, think again!
Texting gives you yet another opportunity to persuade applicants to want to work for your hotel. With so many open opportunities on the hiring market, your hotel needs to yield every competitive advantage available.
Use texting to reemphasize all of the most-loved perks and benefits that come along with a position at your hotel. For larger franchises, this could be things like reduced rates at international sister hotels or nationwide. Smaller beds and breakfasts can emphasize any local benefits, like opportunities to engage with local charities or free home cooked meals during their shifts.
These niche benefits are what can truly sway top talent from leaving the hospitality industry and can motivate a late-stage candidate to choose to work for you over a competitor. Corporate positions can’t offer what your hotel can — so reminding candidates via a simple text message helps drive that point home.
Schedule interviews conveniently
In 2022, the name of the game is speed when it comes to hiring top talent.
One area in the hiring process that is clumsy and at times difficult to manage is interview scheduling. By using texts to set up interviews rather than traditional emails, you’re not only increasing the probability of the candidate responding quickly.
In addition to streamlining the interview setting process, using text messages to set these appointments is convenient for the candidates as well. Many job seekers do not have time to constantly sift through their email inboxes for a message from a hopeful employer; what they do have, however, is a few moments to read a new text message. Between juggling childcare arrangements and current employment responsibilities, top talent undoubtedly has a lot on their plate. Help improve their candidate experience by gently nudging them with a text to set up an interview at their convenience.
Using texts to schedule interviews allows for your candidates to get back to you faster — before your competition even has a chance to click send on an email.
Use texting to power your employee referral program
No matter the size of your hotel operation, there’s unquestionably at least one person on staff that makes your management team’s lives easier. That employee is rarely late, performs their duties without hesitation, and makes your guests feel truly welcome during their stay. If only you could get more people like that on your staff!
With an employee referral program in place at your hotel, you could source applicants from these great employees that will likely share similar work ethic and attitudes as them — and you can use texting to run these programs. For example, you could send regular text messages to existing employees asking them something along the lines of, “Do you have a friend who wants to start a rewarding new career? We want to meet them!” or “Working with friends makes the work day pass faster. Refer a friend to earn $500.”
After collecting the candidate’s contact information, your hotel recruiters can turn around and send them a text message inviting them to an introductory phone screening. This process saves your HR team time by sourcing candidate’s information directly from the people who know them best so they can start interviewing — and hiring — faster than they could before.
Deliver good news faster than ever
Speaking of speeding up your hiring process, you can also use text messages in arguably the most exciting part of the process: by letting the candidate know they received the position.
For example, you can send a simple text that says, “Congratulations — we’re excited to have you on our team!”, once you’ve made your final hiring decision. This channel of communication lets your recruiters get ahold of your favorite candidate faster than any other company.
Alternatively, you can take texting a step further. You can use the messages to prompt candidates to get the ball rolling on initial onboarding steps, like document collection or completing background checks — all before their first day on location!
In today’s hiring market, your hotel needs to be competitive if you want to recruit top talent. With so many open positions still available in the industry, your company needs to stand out from the sea of employers from all industries.
The easiest way to do this? Text your candidates.
With hotel staffing solutions like Hireology, your hotel will be poised to succeed in the coming busy months. To see how Hireology’s all-in-one platform can help your hotel recruit top talent, interview faster, and manage your staff, schedule a 1:1 today!
