(Internal) Sequences: SMS Launch Overview

🔍 Articles in This Section

Please use the following list to see additional internal articles regarding sequences:

• Sequences: Overview
• Sequences: Manual Stages
• Sequence Replies: Using Gem AI to Automatically Set “Interested” Reply Status
• Sequences: Premium Email Finding Auto-Send When Email Is Returned
• Sequences: Auto-sequence upon Form Submission
• Sequences: InMail Reply Tracking
• Sequences: SMS Launch Overview (📍you are here)
• Sequences: Call Forwarding Overview
• Sequences: Linking Gem Sequence Activity for an ATS Job
• Sequences: GoodTime Meet integration

Background

Customers have long wanted ways to reach out to both cold prospects and active candidates from Gem via SMS. SMS is commonly seen among all companies as a more modern, high-touch, personal way to reach out to candidates. It’s also a particularly appealing sourcing tactic for reaching out to non-knowledge workers — talent who may not be sitting in front of their computers checking email all day, but who may be more receptive / available by phone.

Who

All customers on Gem for Teams or Gem Enterprise have access to text messaging.

Functional Overview

• SMS sequence stages are sent automatically the way email stages do
• You can mix up SMS stages with other types of stages (e.g. email, SMS, email, SMS)
• SMS sent in sequences show in activity feed, the same way we do for email sequences. Candidate replies also appear in the activity feed.
• Similar to email sequences, when a prospect replies to your SMS sequence, the sequence will automatically stop and prevent subsequent stages from sending
• If you receive SMS replies from prospects, you’ll get a Gem email notification. To continue texting the prospect, you have 2 options:
• [RECOMMENDED] In the email notification, click the “Reply in Gem” button and the Gem profile page will open, with the extension popped out. In the extension, you’ll see a “Texts” tab at the top. If you click into that tab, you’ll be able to see all your text message history with that candidate and respond instantaneously from there.
• [NOT RECOMMENDED] Reply to the email and the recipient will receive your reply as a normal text (similar to Google Voice’s email forwarding capability). The reason this method is not as ideal is because occasionally, replying by email to send a text message back to the candidate may include the quoted text from the email, email signatures, etc. — this will look bad on the candidate’s end.
• If you send a text message to a prospect and they respond by email (or vice versa) — and if we have that email address on file — we’ll also stop the sequence
• We don’t provide phone numbers from data providers like we do email addresses. We may explore this in the future.
• You can text candidates who have phone numbers listed on Gem profiles. Phone numbers can be added to Gem profiles in several ways:
• a user manually enters a prospect’s phone number onto their profile (try this out on your own profile in the extension)
• prospects fill out Gem’s event registration forms or our Talent Community Typeform forms containing a phone number field, which write to the phone number field on their Gem profiles
• CSV upload containing phone numbers
• Importing candidates from Greenhouse, which ports over contact info including email address and phone number (if available). This is what happens when you message a Greenhouse candidate in Talent Pipeline (more on that in the next section)
• Besides sequencing, you can also send ad-hoc text messages to candidates in 3 different ways:
• If a phone number already exists on the Gem profile, the “Texts” tab appears for them in the Gem extension, and you can start texting them immediately even without sequencing them. You just won’t get any automated follow ups, of course.
• From Talent Pipeline, you can send a text message to any candidate by clicking on the overflow menu in the upper right of the candidate card. If they’re a Greenhouse candidate and they have a phone number listed on their Greenhouse profile, as soon as you click “message,” we automatically import them to Gem (including their email + phone number) and open the message window:

* You can also send 1-off text messages anywhere the Gem extension exists, through the “Send one-off message” option in the “Message” menu of the extension. Since the Gem extension surfaces Gem profiles — not Greenhouse profiles — the Gem profile must have a phone number in order to be able to send text messages:

Future Roadmap

• [DONE] SMS Homepage, aka Gem Inbox — allow users to view all their SMS conversations in 1 place contained in Gem, rather than managing candidate replies from email notifications and swiveling back to various tabs in Gem
• Unsubscribing from SMS also unsubscribes you from the entire team’s SMS, not just the single user who contacted you
• Gem extension: differentiating where phone numbers came from: in the future, you may have phone numbers imported from their linked profiles in the ATS, some added by data providers, others added manually by recruiters, and users will want to distinguish the more trust-worthy ones from the potentially-wrong ones.
• Make sequences auto-skip SMS stages when no phone number is present
• Continually import phone numbers from the ATS for any linked candidates (i.e. candidates who already have profiles in both Gem and Greenhouse)
• We import phone numbers when you first import a candidate from Greenhouse to Gem, but we don’t keep contact info up to date thereafter (e.g. if you add a phone number to a Greenhouse profile, it won’t automatically get synced back to its linked Gem profile)
• Phone number finding: Enriching candidate profiles with phone numbers from data providers (the way we provide email addresses)
• Allow team admins to specify the area code of phone numbers they provision to users when enabling SMS
• WhatsApp integration: lots of companies with international recruiting teams prefer to use WhatsApp to reach their audiences, as WhatsApp tends to be much more frequently used for day-to-day messaging outside the US.
• Supporting international phone numbers for text messages: regardless of WhatsApp support for international usage, some teams want us to support texting international phone numbers. Right now, you can text only numbers with area codes in the US, Canada, and Mexico from Gem.

FAQs

Q: Can users text candidates internationally?

A: No - texting is supported only for candidates with US or Canadian cell phone numbers

Candidates who are in Gem or in Greenhouse; in Talent Pipeline, you can send 1-off text messages to any candidate whether they’re in Greenhouse or in Gem.

Q: What can you send in a text message?

A: Text messages through Gem support the use of emojis, URLs, and plain text. Attachments such as photos and files are not currently supported.

Q: What’s the character limit for SMS?

A: 1200 — you can see the character count when crafting your sequences with SMS stages.

Q: Link tracking: do URLs included in SMS outreach get counted in Content Stats?

A: Not currently, but we can consider that in the future.

Q: Will users be able to receive phone calls if a candidate tries to call the number that they received a Gem text message from?

A: No — they’ll hear an automated message if they try to call that number saying the number can’t receive incoming phone calls.

Q: Can a candidate unsubscribe from receiving text messages?

A: A candidate can opt out of your texting outreach by replying with the words STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE to your message.

This will unsubscribe the prospect from SMS communications going forward — including 1-off SMS sent from Gem — but only from that particular user; other users on the same Gem team can still SMS the candidate until we have implemented team-wide unsubscribe for SMS. Unsubscribing from text messages also unsubscribes that candidate from receiving Gem email sequences, but not branded campaigns.

Q: Where do text messages show up in stats?

A: Nowhere, currently. We’ll soon support SMS stats in:

• Sequence stats: on any sequence page, the stats boxes don’t currentyl include SMS sent/received/replied
• Outreach Stats: breakdown by outreach type will soon include “text message,” in the same way you can already breakdown email vs. InMail
• Pipeline Analytics: text message sent/received will count in the “Sent” column when you’re looking at the “Candidates with Gem Outreach” view

• Background
• Who
• Functional Overview
• Future Roadmap