Why SMS and LinkedIn steps are not in the first release

Sending application-to-person SMS to United States numbers requires 10DLC registration: your business registers as a brand with the carriers, then registers each messaging campaign with its use case and sample content. Unregistered traffic on a long code is filtered, throttled or blocked outright, and unregistered senders attract per-message surcharges. This is a carrier requirement, not a vendor policy, and no CRM can register on your behalf.

So when SMS steps arrive, they will arrive gated. The product will hold your brand and campaign identifiers as fields, refuse to enable SMS steps until they are present, and surface the registration state where you can see it. We will provide the fields and the sending integration; the registration is yours. That is the honest shape of the feature, and it is a large part of why we have not rushed it into Wave 1 as a checkbox that quietly fails in production.

When LinkedIn appears in a sequence, it will be a reminder task and not an automated action. The step will open the profile, show the recruiter the drafted note and ask them to send it themselves. No connection request, message or profile visit will ever be issued by Surhires on a recruiter's behalf.

This is a deliberate limit rather than a gap waiting to be filled. Automated messaging and connection activity conflicts with LinkedIn's terms of service, and the enforcement lands on the individual account, not on the tool that caused it. A recruiter whose LinkedIn is restricted loses their network, their InMail, their saved searches and a large part of their professional identity, usually in the middle of a live search. We are not willing to build a feature whose worst case is that outcome for a customer, and any vendor offering it is transferring that risk to you without saying so.

WhatsApp is generally available for India-market recruiting today, where the infrastructure is proven and the sending relationships exist. Adding the United States to a multi-channel sequence depends on Meta approving templates for your sending number and message category, which is a review queue outside anybody's control and one where recruitment-flavoured content is not automatically waved through.

Until approval clears, a US multi-channel sequence would be email plus tasks with a WhatsApp step that cannot deliver, which is worse than not offering it. When approval is in place, WhatsApp will slot into the same sequence runner with the same session-window awareness it already has, so the work is genuinely waiting on the approval and not on the build.

One sequence object holding steps of different kinds, sharing one set of exit conditions. A reply on any channel will stop every step on every other channel, because the failure everyone has experienced is answering an email and then receiving the text that was already scheduled. Frequency caps will count across channels rather than per channel, so four touches does not silently become twelve.

Channel choice will follow the candidate rather than the campaign. Where a record carries a preferred channel or a consent basis for one channel and not another, the sequence will resolve the step to what is permitted for that person and skip what is not, rather than enrolling only the candidates who happen to be reachable everywhere.

We will not automate LinkedIn actions. We will not send SMS on an account that has not registered. We will not send WhatsApp templates that have not been approved for your number. We will not treat an out-of-office as a reply, and we will not offer a setting that lets a sequence run without checking suppression, however much time it would save on a bulk enrolment.

These are not performance limits that a future release quietly removes. They are the terms on which we think outbound recruiting software should be built, and the reason this page exists as a roadmap page rather than a feature page with an asterisk under it.

Run email cadences with task steps, which is what Wave 1 ships and what carries most of the conversion anyway. Put the call on a task step rather than pretending a text can replace it. Where you work the India market, use WhatsApp properly, on a shared business number with consent on the record.

If SMS matters to your desk, start the 10DLC registration now rather than when the feature lands. Brand and campaign approval takes time, it is independent of any CRM you choose, and having it in place is what will let you switch SMS steps on the week they become available rather than the month after.