Reach candidates on the channel they actually answer

WhatsApp does not work like email. Once a candidate messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens and you can reply with free-form text. Outside that window you can only send a template that Meta has pre-approved, and every recruiter who has tried to run WhatsApp from a personal handset has discovered this the hard way at eleven at night.

Surhires models the window explicitly. The composer on a candidate record shows whether the session is open and how long is left. If it has closed, the composer switches to the approved template list rather than letting a recruiter type a message that will silently fail. A reply from the candidate reopens the window and the composer follows.

That single behaviour removes most of the operational pain. A recruiter does not need to know the rule; the screen enforces it.

Every message you send outside a session window is a template, and every template has to be submitted to Meta for review against their business messaging policy. Approval takes anywhere from minutes to days, categories matter, and a template that reads like marketing when it should read like a utility notification gets rejected or throttled.

Surhires gives you a template library with the recruitment shapes already written: interview invitation, interview reminder, document request, availability check, offer notification, placement start reminder. What we cannot do is approve them. The submission happens under your WhatsApp Business Account, the approval is granted to your business, and the responsibility for keeping the content within policy sits with you.

We say this plainly because the alternative is an agency signing up on a Friday expecting to send on Monday. Plan for the approval cycle.

A candidate has to have opted in before you message them on WhatsApp. Surhires stores the opt-in on the candidate record along with when it was captured, through which channel, and against which wording, in the same structure used for email and SMS consent.

Opt-in arrives from several places in practice: an application form, a careers page checkbox, a reply to an initial contact, or a recruiter recording verbal consent during a call. All four are supported and all four are timestamped. A record with no opt-in cannot be added to a WhatsApp sequence, and the sequence builder says why rather than dropping the record quietly.

This is a capability statement, not a compliance declaration. Whether a given campaign is lawful depends on how you configure and send it.

When a candidate replies STOP, or the local-language equivalent you have configured, the reply handler suppresses that number across every sequence and every desk in the tenant immediately. It does not wait for a nightly job and it does not depend on a recruiter noticing.

Suppression is global to the tenant by design. A candidate who opted out of a contract IT desk's outreach should not receive a message from the healthcare desk the following week because the two recruiters keep separate lists. The suppression list is visible, exportable and auditable, and a suppressed record shows the reason on its activity stream.

Re-opting in is possible, but it has to come from the candidate. A recruiter cannot clear a suppression from the interface.

The router sits between the product and the sending provider. Meta Cloud API, Twilio and DoubleTick are all supported paths today, and the choice is a tenant configuration rather than a rebuild. Agencies with an existing commercial relationship or an established template library on one provider keep it.

Routing matters more than it sounds. Providers differ on pricing, on regional delivery quality, on template management tooling and on how they surface failures. Being able to move without changing how recruiters work is the difference between a bad quarter and a migration project.

Gupshup and Wati are on the roadmap as further routing options for the India market, and both are described on this site as roadmap rather than as connected.

It is not a broadcast marketing channel. The product does not offer an unrestricted bulk blast, because that is the fastest way to get a business number quality-rated down and eventually blocked. Sequences are throttled and templates are categorised.

It is also not a replacement for the candidate record. Media sent by a candidate is attached to the record, but a resume arriving over WhatsApp still goes through parsing and duplicate detection like any other. The channel is an input, not a filing system.