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Welcome to The Solo Recruiter (TSR)! This is a weekly newsletter dedicated to providing actionable insights so that you don’t have to learn through the school of hard knocks. Instead, I teach you how to master the mindset so that you can at least triple your earning potential.

Here’s what on the menu today:

The Late Night Text Test

Some recruiters do this. They send a text to their candidate quite late into the evening.

Then they gauge the “readiness” of the candidate based on how fast they reply.

Frankly if this is intentional, I don’t buy it.

It’s close to harassment on others’ work-life balance.

What I prefer and would advise is this instead. Text them when you genuinely need to, and there are many opportunities to do so, without trying to go out of the way.

Then I wait for their reply and analyze accordingly based on the following factors.

1. The reply came back swiftly in 10-15 minutes.

2. The reply came back within the day. (evening after work)

3. The reply took days and in between I had to send nudges (aka reminders). 🚩🚩🚩

How to decipher the above signals?

1: The candidate is available and replies quickly. OR they are constantly scanning their phones and easily distracted?

2: The candidate is unable to multi-task well, and can only reply after work. OR the candidate is very focused on the work (likely to produce deep work!) and thus made it their principle not to reply to messages during work.

Situation 1 and 2 are inconclusive, but as a recruiter, you appreciate them. No one likes to wait. It’s better to have a quick response and our commonsense says such candidates will behave similarly to their colleagues, which is a plus point.

3: This is a red flag. Anything more than 24 hours is. The candidate is not responsive given the generous amount of time and still they need repeated nudges to respond. Either they are not that interested OR they have an issue with prioritizing.

Takeaway?

There is only one takeaway from the late night text test or any time text test. If you encounter situation 3 candidate, you can SAVE yourself time and move on to other candidates. You save yourself plenty of frustration later. There is no point to pursue. 99.9% it won’t work.

Don’t live on hopeium. It will never bring in revenue.

Joo Kwang
​Author of Solopreneur’s Guide to Recruitment Business

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