How Best To Communicate With Your Clients & Candidates In 2025

In 2025 recruiters have so many options when it comes to communicating with clients & candidates. We’re almost spoilt for choice! We have the standard telephone, mobile phones, VOIP systems, video calls, text messages, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, email, LinkedIn InMails and messages, chatbots, website virtual chat applications, face to face events and so much more. 

And if you haven’t got time to read the full blog post - there’s no one best channel! Different situations will require certain methods and everyone will have their own preference when it comes to speaking with their consultant. For example, I’m a little old school but I always believe feedback should be delivered over the telephone,  whether it’s good or bad news, whether it’s feedback from a telephone interview or a final face to face interview. People will tend to have questions and it’s best handled over a telephone call but that’s just my preference and beliefs based on the market I used to recruit for - media. 

Website

Your recruitment agency’s website is an absolutely amazing tool, often underutilised by recruiters when it comes to communicating with their candidates & clients. I’d always recommend engaging with a professional copywriter when it comes to website copy as you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Get it right first time around. 

When it comes to your recruitment agency website you should present candidates, clients and potential talent with a variety of channels and options, including your social media channels, a general email address and a switchboard telephone number. Ensure your contact form is easily found and all of your company contact information is fully accessible. Ensure your footer holds your contact details too. On your team pages, make sure that each team member lists their LinkedIn profile, as well as their email address and direct line. 

Bearing in mind clients may try to reach out to you between 8am-9am and candidates are likely to want to speak after 5:30pm - generally times when your consultants aren’t in the office so look to integrations such as chatbots or virtual chat applications. 

Mobile Chat Applications

This will encompass any application on your mobile phone that you regularly use to chat with, so it could be your text message app, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, etc. We could lump email here too quite easily but let’s keep it separate for now, as a more traditional and semi-desktop app. I think these are all great ways to communicate with your candidates and potentially clients but it really does depend on your relationship. You could also face a GDPR disaster here if consultants are using their personal mobile numbers and chat applications to communicate with clients & candidates. Plus if they do ever leave your business they have direct access to your best candidates and all of your clients. 

Video Applications

You could quite easily throw in apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger with their video functionality but for the sake of simplicity let’s keep it confined to applications such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. These are all brilliant apps for candidate interviews, client briefing calls and running through candidate shortlists with clients. They really help to build engagement, loyalty and facilitate each party to fully communicate with each other. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a brilliant way to keep in touch with clients & candidates. What could take weeks of work, could be automated into a few minutes. However success rates will likely be lower, emails can lack a degree of personalisation, can be viewed as spam and you can see a flood of unsubscribes if the messaging is off or if your customer segmentation is lacking based on poor CRM data. If your consultants keep a tidy house and data is kept clean then they can be a brilliant tool, delivering highly relevant & personalised messaging to a large volume of clients or candidates. 

Social Media Applications

There’s a blurred line between social media apps and mobile chat apps but for the sake of this article we’ll confine them to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, etc. It’s quite easy to get a reasonable following on LinkedIn as everyone who applies to one of your posted jobs will likely end up automatically following your agency too, which tends to lead to agencies with large LinkedIn follower numbers but very low engagements. Candidates & clients are much less likely to follow you on other social media apps so you’re going to really need to try to up your number here and you’ll really need to differentiate yourself by offering high quality & entertaining content. 

CV Submission

This is pretty much the primary reason a hiring manager will engage with your recruitment agency. They have a live vacancy, they’re not seeing the quantity or quality they expect from their talent acquisition team and they need outside help. On the matter of submitting CVs, everyone has their preference and different sectors will have their own norms and of course the size of the company, the talent acquisition team and their processes will dictate how you should submit your candidates’ CVs. Personally I love a black and white CV, a short email with a bit about the candidate, a video of them if possible and telephone pitch from the consultant to talk me through the CV. In my opinion, the weakest CVs are the CVs that consultants never follow up on. 

Face To Face Client Meetings

Personally, I love face to face meetings, whether that’s lunches, coffees, walking meetings, learning seminars, client office visits, beers down the pub - whatever gets me out of the office. It’s an unparalleled way of building a real and strong relationship with your clients. Telephone & video calls and delivering great CVs are the foundation but you need that face to face time to really cement that relationship and ensure you still get vacancies to work on even in the lean times. 

Conclusion

To sum this all up, there is so much technology available to us these days, along with automations and AI but what really makes a consultant essential and irreplaceable is their ability to communicate between both sides, clients and candidates so make sure you use everything at your disposal to deliver the best service you can.