There’s no question that the way job seekers now look for and explore new opportunities has gone through a sea change and is continuing to evolve. There is also no doubt that mobility plays an increasingly important role in how information is accessed and exchanged between different stakeholders in the hiring process. In the past, job seekers sourced and applied for jobs via a limited number of channels, whereas, modern job seekers find themselves blessed with a wealth of platforms on which to advertise their skills and connect with suitable organizations and roles. Does your organization need a mobile recruiting strategy? Or does it needs to incorporate mobile into its overall recruiting strategy?
Modern recruitment problems call for modern solutions, and recruitment sites must similarly diversify their approach if they are to gain access to the best talent. Statistics show that around 43% of US job seekers used mobile devices to actively search for work in 2014, translating to a slice of the talent pool that your business can’t afford to be missing out on.
Before you get overwhelmed by your perception of what a mobile recruiting strategy is, know that it’s more about improving your overall recruitment strategy and incorporating mobile optimization where it is most relevant. This should also serve as a guideline for what to look for in a modern recruiting platform when you are revamping your recruiting process.
Job seekers are just like any other consumers browsing the marketplace: they don’t like to be disappointed. A study carried out by Jobvite found that 27% of modern job seekers actively expect a recruitment website to be mobile friendly. If your recruitment portal does not accommodate users of mobile devices, you could be turning away more than a quarter of the potential talent. Develop your mobile recruiting strategy to target these candidates.
Recruitment is not a one-sided deal, it is a transaction, and to attract the best quality candidates, you need to provide them with a high quality user experience when they access your recruitment portal.
This means checking and double checking the functionality of your recruitment page across a range of mobile and tablet operating systems and across a variety of browsers to ensure a top quality experience for all applicants. A survey conducted by LinkedIn in 2014 showed that only 18% of recruiting leaders had optimized their job posts for mobile access. Don’t be among that 18%; make sure that your page is optimized for mobile recruiting.
In order to have an effective mobile recruiting strategy, you need to know your complete recruitment strategy inside out. Get a complete understanding of what is happening right now, not just your game plan for the future. A complete and modern recruitment platform can track where candidates are getting to your recruitment portal from, and examine their behavior once they have accessed your site.
This information is invaluable as you develop your future mobile recruiting strategy. Maybe you need to shift your focus away from PPC ads and towards search engine optimization; perhaps you need to work to improve the layout of your page to reduce its bounce rate. Conducting analysis into your traffic and user activity will identify what’s working and what’s not.
The processing power of the modern smartphone is improving all the time, and as 3G, 4G and newer mobile internet plans with unlimited data become increasingly affordable, more and more recruiting sites are looking at ways to diversify their use of media.
High quality video streaming is far more effective at demonstrating the strength of your brand and giving applicants an introduction to your organization than mere text or images, and is an aspect of recruiting that should not be ignored. Remember that your recruiting portal is more than just an access point for job seekers; it is a shop window for your organization. To attract the cream of the talent pool, you need to make that shop window as enticing as possible.
When you are reviewing your recruitment process and the overall strategy, include mobile optimization of the candidate experience as an important part of the complete overhaul that you would eventually implement. However, keep in mind that mobile is an important element of your complete recruitment strategy. The two are not separate and you should not think of one as completely isolated from the other. Look for a modern applicant tracking system that has mobile readiness incorporated into the overall feature set which would also include, sourcing, screening, interview management, candidate scoring, decision making, job offer creation, recruitment analytics and much more.
Photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash