Although TextRecruit has gotten a lot of coverage in the text recruiting space in the last few years due to their early entry into the market, other alternative platforms are starting to nip at their heels with increasingly robust offerings.
One of the more promising texting platforms that we’ve seen gain traction is Emissary.ai, based in New York City and run by a team with a long history in the talent technology space. The company is a young and fast growing competitor with a customer list that already includes major household names as well as hyper growth startups.
Today we’ll look at how TextRecruit and Emissary.ai compare. If you already use TR, Emissary may be an alternative to pilot with your team.
For starters, it’s important to point out that Emissary and TextRecruit are both focused exclusively on recruiting and HR. That’s key because there are generic texting tools out there, but they don’t have features and tools built specifically with recruiters in mind and therefore don’t offer the same ROI and benefits of a dedicated text recruiting platform.
FEATURES
Both alternatives offer an extensive set of features that include the ability to text candidates or prospects individually from any website from within Chrome, texting campaigns or group texting to allow employers to do recruiting outreach at scale, and the ability to integrate short codes seamlessly into the recruiting process.
There are lots of other productivity enhancing tools layered on top of that foundation, but here’s a high level snapshot of core capabilities for each texting platform:
| Feature | Emissary | Textrecruit |
| Mobile App | Coming Soon | X |
| Chrome Extension | X | X |
| 1 to 1 texting | X | X |
| Group texting | X | X |
| ATS integrations | X | X |
| Short Codes | X | X |
| Apply Reminders | X | |
| Text Referrals | X | |
| Virtual Career Fairs | X | |
| Internal Use | X | X |
| Chatbot | Coming Soon | X |
As you can see, there’s a lot of overlap between the features that each vendor offers. In terms of differentiators, TextRecruit’s offering already includes a recruiting chatbot capability and a mobile app, while alternative Emissary plans to launch those features in the near future.
TextRecruit also supports a unique Virtual Career Fair capability, which could be helpful to certain employers that put an emphasis on in person events. Meanwhile Emissary offers some unique ‘top of the funnel’ features like Apply Reminders and ‘Share by Text’, a referral tool… offerings that are geared towards helping employers capture more applicants early in the process.
PRICING
Based on our research, pricing could be an important differentiator for Emissary that employers may want to look at closely, since Emissary’s text recruiting platform appears to include more standard features with each recruiter’s license vs. TextRecruit which seems to use a more ‘add-on’ oriented pricing strategy.
CONCLUSION
Overall, TextRecruit and Emissary both offer a strong set of features for employers looking to up their communication game with candidates. The question may come down to the nitty gritty details of needs and goals when determining the better choice if you want a TextRecruit alternative.