Candidate communication·Updated September 2026

Recruiting text message templates

Twelve templates below, written for frontline hiring and short enough to send as one segment. They are the easy part, and every page on this subject has them.

The hard part is that a recruiting text is a regulated communication in the United States, the rules changed twice in the last eighteen months, and the statistic everyone quotes to justify the channel cannot be measured at all. So the templates come first, and then the seven things that decide whether you can legally send them.

The templates

A standard SMS segment is 160 characters; a message that runs longer is split and billed per segment, and using a single emoji or curly quote switches the whole message to a 70-character segment. Every template here fits one segment with room for a name.

The rule everything else hangs on

A text message is a "call" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and the rules split sharply depending on what your message is for.

Informational messages — the twelve above — need prior express consent. 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(1). Anything that advertises or constitutes telemarketing needs prior express written consent: a signed agreement that clearly authorizes the messages and discloses that signing is not a condition of buying anything. 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(2) and (f)(9). An "advertisement" is material advertising the commercial availability or quality of any property, goods or services. 64.1200(f)(1).

Courts have consistently held that pure recruiting messages are neither. In Gerrard v. Acara Solutions (W.D.N.Y. 2020) texts that merely referenced an employment opportunity were held not to be advertisements or telemarketing, and Friedman v. Torchmark, Dolemba v. Illinois Farmers and Payton v. Kale Realty reach the same result.

Which gives you a bright line to manage, and it is not where most people think it is. The moment a recruiting text starts promoting your organization’s products or services — a cross-sell, a referral scheme framed as an offer, "check out what we do" — it arguably becomes an advertisement, and the written-consent standard attaches. We could find no case holding that a pure recruiting text was an advertisement, which means the boundary is untested rather than settled. Treat it as a gradient and stay well clear of it.

Does a phone number on an application count as consent?

Yes, for messages about the job they applied for. The Eleventh Circuit held in Murphy v. DCI Biologicals (2015) that by voluntarily providing his mobile number on a form, the plaintiff gave prior express consent to be contacted — on a form that did not even ask for a mobile number specifically.

The limiting principle is scope. Consent runs to the purpose for which the number was given. A text about that role, that interview, that offer is covered. A text about a different opening at a different site eighteen months later is a harder argument, and a text about something other than a job is a different standard entirely. That is why template 12 exists: if you want a list you can text later, ask for that permission explicitly and record the answer.

What happened to the one-to-one consent rule

If your compliance notes still say you need separate, individually named consent for every employer on a lead form, they are out of date.

The FCC’s one-to-one consent rule — which would have required consent to name a single seller and required calls to be "logically and topically associated" with the interaction that produced the consent — was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit on 24 January 2025 in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, 127 F.4th 303. The court held that "prior express consent" carries its common-law meaning and the Commission had exceeded its statutory authority; a consumer may validly consent to calls from multiple sellers at once. The FCC did not seek further review and removed the vacated language from the rule in September 2025.

For an employer running lead forms, that is a relaxation rather than a permission slip. The consent disclosure still has to be clear and unmistakable, and state law is untouched.

Opt-outs: seven words, and the ones that are not words

This is where template-driven recruiting programs fail, because most of them are built to catch keywords and nothing else.

Under 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(10), these seven replies are a reasonable means of revoking consent per se:

And then the sentence that catches people out: if a reply uses other words, "the caller must treat that reply text as a valid revocation request if a reasonable person would understand those words to have conveyed a request to revoke consent." Which means all of these are opt-outs too:

Three more requirements in the same rule. Revocation must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days. You may not designate an exclusive means of opting out — you cannot require someone who replied by text to go and use a portal. And if your platform cannot receive replies at all, every message must clearly disclose that and give a working alternative.

You may send exactly one confirmation of the opt-out, containing no marketing, and it is presumed within consent if sent within five minutes. 64.1200(a)(12).

One date matters for 2026. The revocation rules took effect on 11 April 2025, with a one-year waiver of a single element: the requirement that opting out of one message stream revokes consent for all future robocalls and robotexts from that sender. That waiver expired on 11 April 2026. An opt-out from your recruiting texts now reaches your other message streams too.

Quiet hours: the honest answer

The federal quiet-hours rule at 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) bars telephone solicitations before 8am or after 9pm in the recipient’s local time. On the face of the rule it does not reach informational recruiting texts, for the same reason those texts are not telemarketing.

We are not going to tell you to rely on that. A large wave of quiet-hours class actions is running on a broader reading; the Ecommerce Innovation Alliance asked the FCC to settle the question and the Commission sought comment in March 2025 (DA 25-216) without, as far as we can establish, yet ruling. One district court — King v. Bon Charge (D. Del., April 2026) — held that knowingly sharing a number defeats a quiet-hours claim, but it binds one district.

Two states run a tighter window for solicitation calls: Florida, 8am to 8pm (Fla. Stat. 501.616(6)(a), with the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act expressly covering text messages), and Oklahoma, 8am to 8pm (Okla. Stat. tit. 15 s. 775C.4).

The operating rule that costs you nothing: send between 8am and 8pm in the candidate’s time zone, and use their area code as the time zone unless you know better. You lose almost no response, and you stay outside the argument entirely.

Before you can send anything: A2P 10DLC

This one is not law, it is carrier policy, and it is the reason most first attempts at recruiting SMS simply do not arrive.

Since 1 September 2023, unregistered application-to-person traffic from US 10-digit numbers is blocked outright — not throttled, not surcharged. Blocked, with carrier error 30034. You need two registrations: a brand (legal name, EIN, address, authorised representative) and a campaign (use case, sample messages, a written description of how people opt in, and live URLs for a privacy policy and terms).

Then throughput is rationed by a trust score you do not control directly. T-Mobile’s published daily caps run from 200,000 messages a day for a brand scoring 75–100, down to 10,000 at 25–49, 2,000 at 0–24, and 1,000 for a sole proprietor — and that limit is shared across every campaign registered under the same EIN. A single-site home-care agency or a small carrier will land near the bottom of that range, which is worth knowing before you plan a 5,000-candidate re-engagement blast.

What it costs to get wrong

47 U.S.C. 227(b)(3) gives a private right of action for actual loss or $500 per violation, whichever is greater, trebled to $1,500 for a willful or knowing violation. Per message. There is no cap, which is why exposure scales linearly with the size of your list and why a single mis-scoped re-engagement campaign is the expensive mistake in this channel rather than any individual message.

Check a message before you send it

Paste a draft. This counts segments, flags language that would push an informational message toward the advertisement standard, checks for an opt-out, and shows the daily ceiling your carrier trust tier allows.

Interview invitation text message: SMS templates

The interview invitation is the single most-sent recruiting text and the one where a small wording change moves the show-up rate most. Four rules apply to every version below: identify yourself and the company in the first six words, name the role, give a specific time rather than asking for availability, and make the reply one character long.

Direct invitation with a fixed time

A fixed time outperforms "what times work for you" by a wide margin for frontline roles, because the candidate is answering on a break and choosing is work. Offer the alternative in the same message so declining is not a dead end.

Two-option invitation

Phone screen invitation

Same-day interview for an open-house or walk-in

Interview reminder, sent the day before

The reminder is the cheapest no-show reduction available. Send it about 18 hours out — late enough to be current, early enough that a reschedule is still possible for both of you.

Job offer text message sample

A text can carry the news, but it should not be the offer. Send the written offer letter in the same hour and say in the text that you are doing it — the terms, the contingencies and the at-will language belong in a document, not in a message thread. Our job offer letter template has the letter that should follow this text.

Reschedule, offered before they have to ask

Two options again, never an open question. The same message works when the candidate is the one who needs to move: make rescheduling one reply, because a candidate who has to phone to change an interview does not change it, they just do not come.

After a no-show, sent once

Send this once, the same day, and then stop. A meaningful share of no-shows reschedule and hire perfectly well, and the message costs nothing; a second and third chase costs you the goodwill of the ones who genuinely moved on. The scheduling mechanics that prevent most no-shows in the first place — shorter gaps, one-tap booking, reminders the evening before and the morning of — are on interview scheduling.

Recruiting message examples: what to send at each stage

Most recruiting message samples circulating online are written for corporate sourcing — long, formal, and addressed to someone who is not looking. For frontline hiring, the messages that work are short, immediate, and sent to people who already applied. Here is one sample per stage of the sequence.

The last row is the one nearly everyone skips, and it is the cheapest goodwill in recruiting. A candidate who gets a clear no comes back when you post again; a candidate who gets silence tells people you ghosted them.

The advertisement check is a word-list heuristic, not legal advice — it catches the obvious cases and cannot judge context. Segment counts follow the GSM-7 and UCS-2 rules carriers actually bill on. Daily caps are T-Mobile’s published figures; AT&T and Verizon ration by messages per minute instead.

Where this sits beside our other pages

These messages are the follow-up layer. Interview no-shows and candidate ghosting covers the problem template 5 exists to solve, recruiting email templates is the same job on the slower channel, and text recruiting software covers the tooling. If nobody is reaching the top of the funnel to text in the first place, that is recruiting strategies.

Sending these at volume, with the opt-out handling, the ten-business-day clock and the 10DLC registration already in place, is what Boostpoint Connect does — the SMS follow-up layer on top of a campaign. That is the one thing on this page we sell.

Frequently asked questions

Sources