Start a Conversation and Send Replies

When you want to start a conversation with a candidate, you can either use a business template or a blank template (which is associated with the WhatsApp Conversation Starter category). Because business templates are used for specific purposes, the blank template is more suited to starting a general conversation.

When you select the blank template, you’ll notice that it contains some predefined text.

You can add your message to this predefined text. When you start entering your message, you'll notice that it's added to the predefined text in the Preview section.

If the candidate responds to your starter conversation, you can reply to them using free-form text for 24 hours from the time of their last response. You create this free-form using the Blank Template type again. However, during this 24-hour period, this template won’t contain any predefined text. You can write your own message and also use AI Assist to help with it. The maximum number of characters you can use in this free-form text is 4096 characters.

During this 24-hour period, you can also send messages using any other approved business template.

When 24 hours have passed since the last response from the candidate, you’ll again need to use the WhatsApp Conversation Starter blank template to start a new thread with the candidate. You can’t send free-form messages at this time. You can also use any approved business template to start the conversation. Refer to the Meta documentation for the latest updates about the 24-hour window.

A few points to consider about business templates:

• You can’t edit the content in business templates when composing a message or when using the Send WhatsApp Message menu item. You can only preview the WhatsApp message with the tokens resolved.
• As per Meta guidelines, business template-based WhatsApp messages of the Marketing category won’t be delivered to United States phone numbers for a temporary period. For more information, see the Meta documentation.