Aquent: A new text platform to support recruiter outreach

Role: Product manager for an in-house tech and design team at Aquent, a global staffing company. 

Team: Agile squad with 3 developers, 1 QA specialist, 1 UX designer and 1 agile development manager

Problem:

Text messaging is the way we communicate, yet most of our company’s 300+ recruiters were still using email for their primary method of communicating with candidates. We know that speed is crucial in the recruitment business, and recruiters need a faster way to reach out to potential candidates about new jobs. 

Potential Gains:

  • A competitive advantage when our recruiters connect with the top candidates first 

  • Faster candidate responses = less time clients wait for a new candidate

Discovery activities:

  • Build vs. Buy vs. hybrid build/buy exploration

  • text vendor landscape evaluation 

  • User interviews and surveys

  • Recruitment Communication market research 

  • high-level stakeholder discussions about recruitment long term vision and strategy

  • Collected research into a comprehensive Talent Communication report

Ideation Phase: 

Through research and the discovery process, we decided to implement a third party text vendor in a hybrid “build and buy” option. We selected a vendor after a thorough evaluation that included the collaboration of our legal, financial, and development teams. This vendor allowed us the flexibility to create cusomtiued text features within our Applicant Tracking system,  while allowing the user to the benefit of using the vendor text manager dashboard to continue conversations with candidates. 



Pre-Launch Activities:

  • Experimental pilot program to test out new features and encourage strong adoption with launch. A select group of recruiters used text only for a month and we found stronger results from the efforts of this group. This helped push our decision to move to text for all recruitment communication.

  • First-look and prep with Managers and influential recruiting leaders

  • Created FAQ docs, training resources, video walkthrough, and
    kick-off slide decks

  • Launch meeting call with all recruiters

  • “Office Hours” and Q&A sessions with field

  • Facilitated a QA Swarm with the squad to ensure that the product launch would be smooth

Outcomes:

  • Faster Candidate responses: Text Gather has a response time that is 3 times faster than email. This response time helps recruiters share candidates faster with Clients, and gives us an advantage over our competitors.

  • More responses from more candidates: We saw an average of 15% more responses with text, with some weeks as much as 40% increase.

  • Less effort to get a role filled: With the shift text messaging and the benefit of improved responses, recruiters can now fill a job with less overall outreach effort. Our conversion-to-fill rate saw that jobs need half as many talent messaged to get a fill with text. This helped improve our ability to fill more jobs, and faster.