Ask a room of recruiters how they contact candidates and most will say email, because that is where the templates live and that is what the last system did. Ask the same room how they would want to be contacted about a job they applied for last night, and most will say a text. That gap is worth closing. This post lays out what we see in reply rates for SMS versus email, where each channel earns its place, and how to run both without annoying anyone.
The reply rate gap
The figures below are illustrative ranges rather than a single study, but they are consistent with what teams report once they start measuring by channel.
- Open rate: SMS is read in the high 90s within minutes. Recruiting email lands somewhere between 20 and 40 percent opens, often over a day or two.
- Reply rate to a first outreach: SMS commonly sees 35 to 50 percent replies. Email to the same candidates tends to sit in the 8 to 15 percent range.
- Time to reply: median SMS replies arrive in under 10 minutes. Median email replies, when they come, take several hours to a day.
- Interview confirmation: a text reminder the day before typically cuts no-shows by a third or more compared with email-only reminders.
Put simply, a text is three to five times more likely to get a reply, and the reply comes ten to fifty times faster. For a pipeline where the first responder usually wins the candidate, that is not a small edge.
Why SMS wins the first touch
Texts win for the same reason they win in every other part of life. They are short, they arrive on the device the person is already holding, and replying takes ten seconds. Recruiting email loses for the mirror-image reasons: it competes with promotions and newsletters, it often reads like a form letter, and answering it feels like a task.
There is also a fairness angle. Plenty of great candidates for hourly, field, and clinical roles do not sit at a desk with their inbox open. A driver, a nurse, or a technician checks texts between tasks and email at the end of the week, if at all. Email-only outreach quietly filters those people out.
Where email still belongs
None of this makes email obsolete. It just changes its job.
- 01Anything long or formal. Offer letters, detailed interview agendas, benefits summaries, and documents to review belong in email, where they can be found again later.
- 02Anything with attachments or links to fill out. A text can point to it, but the substance should live in the email.
- 03Senior and specialist roles. Many candidates for director-level or highly technical positions expect a considered email first and may find an unsolicited text presumptuous. Read the room.
- 04Passive candidates you have never spoken to. A cold text from an unknown number can land badly. Email first, text once they have replied.
Running both channels without the mess
The failure mode of using two channels is that the conversation splits. The recruiter texted on Tuesday, the coordinator emailed on Wednesday, and neither can see what the other said. Candidates notice, and it makes the team look disorganised.
The fix is to keep everything in one thread on the candidate record. In Apex ATS, SMS and email to the same person show up as a single chat-style conversation in the shared team inbox, so anyone on the team can pick it up and see the whole history. A few practical rules on top of that:
- Text for anything time-sensitive: confirmations, reminders, quick questions, and scheduling links.
- Email for anything the candidate will need to refer back to.
- Use templates for both, and keep the SMS templates under 160 characters where you can. One question per text.
- Bulk send is for the first touch and reminders, not for the conversation. Once someone replies, a human writes the next message.
- Always identify yourself and the company in the first text, and honour opt-outs immediately.
Measure it for your own roles
Averages are useful for deciding where to start, but your candidates are not the average. For a month, tag each first-touch message by channel and track reply rate, time to reply, and whether the candidate reached the interview stage. You will probably find SMS wins for most roles and email holds its own for a few. Then set your templates accordingly.
The bigger lesson is not that one channel is better. It is that the channel should match the moment. Quick and time-sensitive means text. Detailed and worth keeping means email. Get that right, keep it all in one thread, and the reply rates take care of themselves.