It’s no secret that text messaging has become a valuable tool in the recruitment process. Text recruiting helps talent acquisition teams speed up the hiring process, and according to data from the Yello 2019 Recruiting Study, 33% of all candidates include texting among their top two preferred modes of communication. The ability to text candidates is essential, but it’s important to send the right message at the right time, through the right channel. And while using your personal mobile device to text candidates may seem convenient, there are several reasons why it’s not a good idea.

Here’s why you should swap your own smartphone for dedicated recruiting software that will help with candidate relationship management:

You Might Send a Text Message Down the Wrong Pipe

In some ways, your personal cell phone’s most dangerous feature is your contact list. When you’re using your device on your own time to text your partner or your kids, you could accidentally send a personal note to a candidate instead of your intended recipient.

Accidental text messages and social media posts happen all the time — just ask the American Red Cross, Twitter or Stubhub. These embarrassing mistakes were made by well-intentioned employees doing the same thing as you—using a personal device to conduct official business.

Using candidate relationship management (CRM) software for text recruiting completely eliminates the wrong-pipe option.

You’re Putting Your Personal Contact Information in the Hands of Strangers

Unless you want to use your personal time to field text messages and phone calls from overzealous or emotional candidates, you really shouldn’t be sharing your personal cell phone number.

Using recruitment CRM software for messaging keeps your personal contact information private. It also lets you automate some of the more mundane and repetitive aspects of candidate communication so you and your team can focus on more significant and impactful tasks.

You’re Being Reckless with Your Candidate’s Personal Information

How secure is your personal device? Do you keep it under lock and key? In the United States, around 160,000 cell phones are stolen every day—and that’s to say nothing of the thousands and thousands of devices that are simply lost by their owners.

If you somehow get separated from your device, you could put your candidate’s personal information in the wrong hands.

Not only does a CRM tool keep your candidate’s personal information completely secure, but it also prevents you from violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations while keeping you in compliance with your organization’s record-keeping requirements.

You’re Slowing Down The Hiring Process

While using your phone to text applicants on the go can be a great thing, there’s no way to automate messaging on your personal device. Recruitment CRM software makes it easy to schedule automatic interview reminders, send quick follow-up materials after a recruiting event and more — without having to remember to hit “send” every time.

Using your own device for text recruiting also makes it difficult to align your texting efforts with the other types of messaging you send. Keeping all of your recruiting texts, emails and other types of communication in one place makes it easier to understand what you’ve sent to each candidate, identify gaps where you could be providing more information, and enable hiring managers and other interviewers to pick up where you left off when communicating with a candidate.

You’re Missing Out on All Kinds of Valuable Analytics

Texting candidates from your personal device can cause communication bottlenecks and create hours of unnecessary busywork for your recruiting team. That’s because all of your text recruiting lives on a device in your pocket or purse, and not in a central location where everyone on your team can see it. If you and your team are contacting candidates from your own phones, there’s no way for you to store previous conversations, identify successes and learn from mistakes.

When your text recruiting is managed through CRM software, you can turn messaging into data that can reveal valuable insights and trends, refine your recruitment processes and inform future strategies.

Using CRM software keeps candidate information secure, eliminates avoidable mistakes, adds automation and other efficiencies, and enables smarter decisions by providing incredibly valuable data. Text messaging is a powerful tool for candidate communication, but you cannot get the most out of the technology when you and your team are generating texts from your personal mobile devices.