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Published: July 2001

Recognising the potential of text messaging as a powerful direct marketing tool has paid off for Relay Recruitment reporting a staggering response rate.

Laurence Elliott, Sales & Operations Director at Bradford’s Relay Recruitment, employed a team of consultants to contact 3,000 candidate workers on the company’s database who had not been in contact for more than six months.

Each received a personal message asking if they were still seeking work or a job change, and if so, to get in touch. Incredibly, a little over 72 per cent – some 2163 people - responded to the messages; the vast majority of them expressing interest in Relay’s vacancies.

Says Laurence, “Text messaging is currently the number one way of staying in touch with friends and the office, and it is clear that people will respond to it more readily than traditional marketing routes.

“It’s fun, efficient and compulsive; people are always intrigued when they receive a message and since they also enjoy composing and sending them, are usually impelled to respond. As such, it just made sense to communicate with some of our ‘lapsed’ candidates in this way.”

As well as updating Relay’s database, the novel method led to over two hundred varied vacancies - from assembly line workers to IT specialists - being filled in a little over a week.