Message candidates on WhatsApp, right from Workable

Your shortlist is ready, your emails are out — and nothing comes back. In many hiring markets, that silence isn’t disinterest. Candidates simply don’t check work email, and they won’t pick up a call from a number they don’t know. Meanwhile, the one app they check constantly is WhatsApp.

Why email alone isn’t enough anymore

In regions like Latin America, the Middle East, and Southern Europe, WhatsApp is the default way people communicate — with open rates of up to 98%. When recruiters can’t meet candidates there, response times stretch, pipelines stall, and strong candidates drop off before you ever speak to them. Some teams work around this by messaging candidates from personal phones or third-party tools. That gets a reply, but at a cost: conversations live outside your ATS, teammates lose context, and there’s no record of what was said or when.

What’s changing

With Workable’s new WhatsApp integration, you can send and receive WhatsApp messages directly from the candidate’s profile — no separate apps, no copy-pasting, no lost threads. Every conversation is stored centrally alongside emails, notes, and evaluations, so your whole team has the full picture at every stage of the pipeline.

Here’s what that means in practice:

• Faster responses: reach candidates on the channel they actually check
• No lost threads: every WhatsApp conversation is logged under the candidate record, automatically
• Full team context: anyone on the hiring team can see the conversation history, right where they already work
• Built for your market: designed for teams hiring where WhatsApp is how people communicate

How it works

Open a candidate’s profile, start a WhatsApp conversation, and keep the discussion moving — scheduling a screening call, answering a quick question, or nudging a candidate who’s gone quiet. When the candidate replies, the message lands back in the same thread in Workable. There’s nothing to export and nothing to reconcile: the audit trail builds itself as you work.

Because conversations sit next to the rest of the candidate’s record, handoffs get easier too. A recruiter can start the conversation, and a hiring manager can pick it up with complete context — no forwarded screenshots, no “what did they say again?”

Reach candidates where they’ll actually answer

Hiring speed is often decided by response speed. Teams that meet candidates on their preferred channel hear back sooner, keep momentum through the pipeline, and lose fewer people to slow communication. With WhatsApp built natively into Workable, you get that speed without giving up the structure, history, and compliance of your ATS.

See it for yourself

The WhatsApp integration is available as a simple paid add-on, rolling out to early customers now and generally available in September 2026. Visit our help center to learn how to set it up, or talk to your account manager to add it to your plan.