When a phone plan subscriber ends their subscription or transfers their number to a different mobile/wireless carrier, the original carrier will mark the number as “deactivated” or “retired.” The deactivated numbers are eventually recycled and reassigned to new owners, but if you are not notified, then the new owner of that phone number could receive your account messaging when they haven't opted in to receive those messages. 

To prevent this from happening and, subsequently, having your messages be flagged as spam, filtered by carriers, or your company potentially be charged fines from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), Paradox notes in the system when a candidate's or user's phone number was deactivated and removes it from the system.

Deactivated number process

In order to remain compliant with laws and regulations relating to opt-in consent, you can only message people who have opted into receive messages. If someone has a deactivated phone number, then any person who purchases the new phone number should not be messaged. 

Paradox uses Twilio’s deactivation protocol API to retrieve a list of phone numbers that carriers have confirmed are deactivated by the end user. If any of the phone numbers currently belonging to candidates or users are found on the list of deactivated numbers, then they are removed from the CEM. Deactivated numbers can no longer receive notifications from the CEM unless the new owner of the number decides to apply to one of your jobs.

CEM visibility

Candidate or Employee Profiles that have deactivated phone numbers will have text denoting that the number was deactivated in the Phone Number field. These profiles will not have phone numbers available anymore, preventing the CEM from sending SMS messages to the profiles that do not have a phone number attached to them.