Think about how you communicate with your friends and family. Chances are, you don’t spend much energy wondering if a phone number is textable -- every friend, family member, acquaintance, and kids’ soccer coach that you communicate with has a single number that you can call or text without thinking about it.

Communicating with your business should be just as straightforward -- it’s what your customers expect. Here’s why you should enable texting for all of your team members.

The need for business-class text messaging™ is spanning the globe. No matter where your business is, your customers expect on-demand communication. They want to reach you on their terms, not on yours.

That’s why we’re super excited to announce our expansion into Europe, where we’ll bring real-time communication to clients and customers looking to shift their business into the speed of Now. Our newest headquarters is located in Krakow, Poland, and our customer experience team there is ready to help you tap real-time 1-to-1 conversations, build better relationships, and grow your business faster.

Gone are the days when businesses set the rules of engagement. The internet has leveled the field. Your customers are used to getting what they want, when they want, whether that’s an instant delivery from Amazon or on-demand customer support when something’s broken.

But the good news is it’s pretty simple to meet clients where they are. Your best customers just have a few requests about how they reach you.

Business texting, like any communication, is a psychological art. Use these science-driven tips to get fast, meaningful responses from your best prospects.

BOULDER, CO -- TextUs, the fastest-growing business-class text messaging™ software, will join recruitment industry professionals at Bullhorn Live in Sydney, Australia on May 7th.

Over 700 staffing firms in the United States use TextUs to communicate in real time with recruiting candidates. Industry giants such as Manpower, Allegis, Employbridge and Recruit.com use TextUs to:

• Boost candidate response rates up to 800% over phone calls and emails alone
• Move candidates quickly through the journey to get faster job placements
• Eliminate endless calls and wasted voicemails

Fastest-growing business-class texting platform now used by over 700 staffing firms to quickly place job candidates

BOULDER, CO -- TextUs, the leading business-class text messaging™ software, announced today that over 700 staffing firms now use the platform to communicate in real time with staffing and recruiting candidates. Debuting at #573 on the Inc. 5000, TextUs is the fastest-growing text messaging software solution in the country.

We love year-end lists. From the best books, movies, and memes to the weirdly specific lists (2018 best weird dog names, anyone?), year-end lists help us remember what we loved and learned in the last year and to find new gems.

So here’s our contribution: our most-read articles of 2018.

If you aren’t texting, you’re missing out on potential deals. Sales have had to pivot since inception, from door-to-door salespeople to letters to phone calls (a big leap!), then calls to email. And, just as you would’ve been missing out on great connections if you hadn’t started emailing your prospects in the past decade, today, you need to text your contacts. Just take a look:

• 97% of Americans - a bulk of your customer base - text every single day.
• Texts have a 98% open rate. Email has 20%. And the percentage for returning voicemails is abysmally lower.
• 90% of engaged leads prefer to be texted vs called.

Let’s put those numbers into words.

Use texting for quick announcements and emergency blasts to internal staff and contacts. Brief enough to grab attention and more widely-accessed than email or calls (which may be jammed during an emergency), texts are a great way to quickly get time-sensitive messages to your audience.

Reasons you might send an emergency text:

• Impending catastrophic weather
• A national emergency affecting your business and customers
• An active, dangerous situation inside your building

Prepare on how to send an effective SOS text so you’re ready if the emergency strikes.

Remember when you had to message back and forth endlessly just to find a time to meet with a contact? How people would wander off during the scheduling process if it was taking too long to get a meeting on the books? How sometimes you would double-book meetings, not realizing you’d offer the same time slot to two people?

If you’re thinking something like, yes, because these things happened this week!, then we’re going to take a moment to geek out to you about digital scheduling services. If your company isn’t using a platform like Calendly or Doodle or their sales tool cousins, like Hubspot’s Meetings or Drift Meetings, please try one of them out right now.

Aren’t they awesome!?

Meridian Technologies, an IT staffing firm, knew the power of texting. “If you’re not texting candidates, you’re behind the eight ball,” said Justin Van Tassel, Director of Recruiting, Talent Acquisition, Training & Development.

Their recruiters were using their personal cell phones to text with prospects and candidates and seeing great response rates over email and phone outreach alone.

But not everyone was comfortable using their personal cell phones, and as a result, Meridian wasn’t able to adopt text messaging company-wide. What’s more, when the staffing firm was using a BYOD (bring-your-own-device) model, management had zero insight into the quality, frequency, and efficacy of text outreach. This left a big hole in their analytics.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve integrated with Greenhouse, the applicant tracking system and talent acquisition software that optimizes the entire recruiting process. TextUs for Greenhouse enhances your ATS experience with integrated text messaging, improving workforce productivity, increasing communication efficiency, and boosting customer engagement.

With the new integration, Greenhouse users can send and receive personalized text messages directly from their ATS to communicate in real-time with your candidates. The integration also allows users to track text touches directly from candidate profiles.

We are extremely excited to announce that Ericka Hyson has joined our team as our new Chief Operating Officer. In her new role, Ericka will drive team development, make sure our clients are happy and successful, and spur more of this wild growth we’ve been working so hard for these past few years.

Nowadays, it’s expected that businesses use text messaging. In fact, 64% of customer prefer text messaging over voice when it comes to customer service. Because texting for business has become the norm, you can use it much in the same way you would phone or email to get a conversation with a prospect going. The biggest difference? That’s right -- people actually read their text messages.

Staffing Hub, the go-to site for staffing industry intelligence, just introduced The Staffing Show, the only podcast that delivers tools, tips, and tactics from the staffing and recruiting industry’s top executives and thought leaders. TextUs is proud to co-sponsor The Staffing Show.

Sometimes, the right message is all it takes to get a meeting with your contacts. And text messaging is the perfect medium for setting appointments. It helps you ask simple questions and get quick answers back, just what you need to fill your calendar.

TextUs is psyched to be a part of the 8th Annual Boulder Startup Crawl today. Stop by the our offices to come enjoy the amazing rooftop view and get a taste of the TextUs experience (and our grilling skills!), take a peek at our offices (where the magic happens), and meet the funnest team in town (🍻).

You can now stream the 2018 State of Staffing Webinar, featuring an in-depth exploration of the data from the State of Staffing report. It also offers actionable tips on how you can align your outreach strategy, candidate experience, and tech stack to fuel optimal growth.

Your team works hard to source candidates, connect with top talent, and fill open positions as fast as possible. The race to scoop up talent is real, and you know that if your team isn’t the first ones out of the gate, your odds of winning plummet. But, do you know how your team compares to industry averages for days to close?

Maybe you have bad associations with texting a lot of people at once. You think “mass texting” and you might picture the worst kind of business communication -- anonymous, generic outreach or promotional messages that don’t meaningfully consider the audience on the other side of them.