Last week I spoke with the guys at Emissary.ai, a new text recruiting tool born out of the offices of Juju.com the job aggregator.
Emissary has a plugin for job boards that helps drive traffic/applies through text reminders. It is currently live on sites like CareersInGovernment.com on their job postings. Emissary has several ways employers can leverage text but they are also targeting job boards who want to add texting as a new marketing channel.
It works by embedding a small piece of javascript code on your job description pages and by also adding a tracking code to your thank you page. Upon visiting that job listing, the script pops up after 5 seconds and offers the user an option to enter their phone number which will then remind them on a daily basis until they return and apply to the job. Here’s a screenshot.
I was able to contact Michael Hurwitz who runs CareersinGovernment about the results so far. In the 45 days since he and his team activated the widget they have seen impressive results. “25% of all visitors to a job page will enter in their phone number and 22% of those will come back to the page later to apply via the text reminder”, he told me by phone.
Hurwitz also mentioned that if he didn’t have it in place, he thinks they’d be losing candidates and added that he was ‘pleasantly surprised at the amount of users who are open to getting text reminders for jobs’. At first he was worried they would find it annoying.
I think job boards and applicant tracking vendors need to do more with texting features like what Emissary offers. Text is an untapped marketing channel that will increase both traffic and applies if you give your users the option. To my knowledge, few if any job board software vendors have added this feature but they should not wait to add it. Its probably the single biggest thing they can do to improve their business.
Text is the new email.
NOTE: The Emissary widget will not work for hosted job board solutions like Jobboard.io or SmartJobBoard just yet. If you have a custom built site or one on WordPress your web developer can easily add the code to get it in place.
