SMS & Texting

Email gets read on its own schedule, hours or days after it lands. A text gets read in minutes — which is exactly why the fastest-moving recruiting teams treat SMS as the primary channel, not a backup for when email doesn't work. The tradeoff is that texting done badly (no consent trail, no opt-out, messages sent at 2am) creates real compliance exposure under the TCPA, so the mechanics matter as much as the speed.

ATS Mako's SMS isn't a separate app layered on top of the ATS with its own login and its own history — it's the same inbox recruiters already work in, so a text a candidate sends back shows up next to their application, their interview status, and every other message in their file. That matters most in high-volume hiring, where a recruiter juggling dozens of open conversations can't afford to check a second tool to see who just replied.

The channel that catches candidates before they go quiet.

The gap between a candidate applying and a recruiter making real contact is where most candidate ghosting takes hold — and it's also the gap two-way SMS closes fastest, since a text can go out the moment an application lands and get a reply within minutes, not whenever someone checks an inbox. The same speed advantage applies to interview confirmations, reminders, and offer follow-up: every one of those moments is a place a slow channel loses candidates to a faster-moving competitor, and a fast one doesn't.

Because every message — sent one at a time or as part of a bulk, segmented campaign — lands in the same threaded inbox, a recruiter never has to piece together a candidate's communication history across two systems. That single-inbox design is also what makes automated, triggered follow-up sequences actually safe to run at scale: a candidate's reply is seen immediately, which is what lets the next scheduled message in a sequence get canceled the moment someone responds.