Candidates reply to messages, not emails.
Screening and scheduling are the slowest parts of hiring, and both are conversations.
Recruiters and HR teams use business messaging to reach candidates where they actually respond. Screening questions, interview scheduling, document collection, and onboarding all involve short exchanges that stall in email, and messaging turns a three-day scheduling loop into one that finishes the same afternoon.
What usually goes wrong.
- Candidates do not read recruitment email
- Response rates on email are low and slow, and the best candidates are gone by the time a thread gets going.
- Scheduling takes more messages than the interview
- Proposing times, having them rejected, and proposing again is the single most repeated task in recruitment.
- Screening asks the same five questions forever
- Notice period, location, salary expectation, and eligibility are asked of every candidate and typed out every time.
What Otobiz does about it.
Screening questions asked in conversation
Your screening questions are asked as part of the reply and the answers land on the candidate record as structured fields, so a recruiter opens a thread that already has what they need.
- Answers written onto the contact as custom fields
- Segments combining those fields with recency
- Handoff to a recruiter with the full thread attached
Interview scheduling on the thread
Publish interview slots with a duration and a buffer, let candidates pick from real availability, and send a reminder before the interview on the channel they use.
- Only the interview slots that are genuinely free
- Two customers cannot take the same slot
- One reminder per booking
Document collection and onboarding
Documents arrive on the thread and attach to the candidate record, and an onboarding sequence walks a new joiner through the steps with each message screened before it sends.
- Attachments stored against the candidate
- Sequences for onboarding steps
- Contacts exit on reply or completion
A person on anything that matters
Campaigns, scheduled sends, and anything that writes to another system queue for approval. The approval is bound to the exact message you approved and re-checked at send time, so what the approver saw is what goes out.
- Approve, edit, or reject before anything leaves
- The message you approved is the message that sends
- Every send logged with who approved it
Talent pools kept warm between roles
A strong candidate who was not right this time is worth contacting when the next role opens. Segments on skills, location, and stage make that a query.
- Segments from captured screening fields
- Consent recorded with the wording the candidate was shown
- Frequency caps so a candidate is not contacted repeatedly
Common questions
Will the AI decide who to hire?
- No. It asks your screening questions and records the answers. Hiring decisions are made by people, and anything that resembles one is not automated here.
Can candidates book their own interview slot?
- A booking page shows real availability from your rules and links or creates the candidate record when they book.
Can recruiters be limited to their own candidates?
- Yes. A member can be restricted to assigned contacts, with personal details masked at the point they are read.
Can candidates send documents?
- Yes on WhatsApp and Messenger. Attachments store against the candidate record under the same access limits as the rest of it.
Do we need consent to message candidates?
- A candidate who messages you first grants a transactional basis. Messaging a sourced list needs a recorded opt-in, and contacts without one are excluded.
Can we delete a candidate's data after a hiring round?
- Yes. Deleting the contact removes its messages, attachments, and stored facts.
Can we keep candidates warm between roles?
- Segment on the fields captured during screening and message them when something relevant opens, with consent screening and frequency caps applied.
Can we message candidates in bulk about a new opening?
- Only contacts with a consent basis. Campaign-scale sends queue for approval, and contacts with no recorded opt-in are excluded with the reason shown.