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Talk About a Bad Recruitment Strategy...

In Hiring Strategy — by Erin Engstrom

Trakstar Hire is an integral aspect of the recruitment strategy of more than 1,500 organizations. Our software is designed to guide companies in setting up their hiring process, with enough flexibility so that they can make it entirely their own. We’re happy to offer guidance to companies who need it. Ultimately, though, the way each company sets up their recruitment and hiring is entirely their own.

Recently, we received a strange tweet:

I say “strange,” because we don’t text candidates. Cold-texting prospective candidates is simply not part of our recruitment strategy. Furthermore, the recipient of this text was a U.S.-based developer. Our dev team is based in India.

I reached out him to for more details, and he responded accordingly:

I still had no idea what he was talking about. But before I could respond, he tweeted this:

Okay, that made more sense. It was someone who was using our product who was sending those messages. Within a few minutes, two more annoyed people tweeted at us:

I reached out to our crack customer happiness team and informed them of what was happening. Turns out they already knew: They’d gotten four emails complaining about the text spam. They’d also emailed the offending recruiter to inform him of the complaints and politely asked him to stop with the texts.

On Twitter, I responded to the annoyed candidates to explain that each of our customers manages their own hiring process and we’d asked the recruiter to stop texting; I also apologized on his behalf.

We also had two people message us on Facebook:

I conveyed the same message to them as to the folks on Twitter.

To recap, here’s the count of candidate complaints:

• 2 on Facebook
• 3 on Twitter
• 4 via email

All within about an hour. And that’s just who we heard from. Inevitably there were dozens if not hundreds of other annoyed text recipients who kept silent or complained to someone else.

To be clear, users cannot send text messages through Trakstar Hire. The spammy recruiter would have needed to use a different system to send these messages.

It’s not fun to be implicated in someone else’s actions, but I guess this is the very definition of a “teachable moment.”

So, recruiters take note: We’re sure you’re too smart for such tactics. But if cold-texting candidates is part of your recruiting arsenal, well, you may want to rethink that. Considering the response we’ve gotten, it does NOT seem to be an effective sourcing method.

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Trakstar Hire is considered the most user friendly hiring software on the market. If you’re ready to take your recruiting and hiring to the next level, request a Trakstar Hire demo today.