Next to predictive analytics, most talent acquisition conferences spend a lot of time on mobile recruiting. I have been to three TA conferences this year alone and each time, I come away with mixed messages about how companies should be using mobile. One thing’s for sure, the smart phone is more popular than the desktop and if your recruitment strategy doesn’t make it easy for future hires to access your jobs from these devices, you will be definitely be at a disadvantage.
According to a recent survey (IBM Survey), IBM surveyed over 16,000 workers in 23 countries, found that 70% of “high potentials” view mobile recruitment as a huge positive in their job search vs. 40% for everyone else.
This is not surprising data. The smart phone rules our lives. For anyone that has ever lost their phone, the pain you feel until you are reunited with the device is mind boggling.
As an employer, all you hear is that you have to be on mobile. But what does that really mean and what does it cost? This is where it gets tricky. So much depends on the types of jobs you hire and your budget.
The IBM survey lists the six things “high potentials” utilize with their cell phones:
1. Search Job Postings
2. Look for information about potential jobs.
3. Get Job Alerts.
4. Express Interest in job openings.
5. Complete an application.
6. Take job related assessments.
The same survey (and many others) points out many companies don’t have a mobile career site, data security or an easy way to apply to jobs (think long form applicant tracking system).
At OrlandoJobs.com, we invested in mobile 3 years ago and have updated many times since. I feel very confident we make it easy for jobseekers to search jobs (try it, pull up OJ on your cell phone) and we send out over 200,000 job alerts weekly to our job seeker community that are mobile optimized. We are able to take our client’s jobs and have the optimized for mobile. (46% of OJ traffic comes from mobile in 2016).
If your career site can serve jobs to job seekers on their cell phones and give information about your company that is clear and mobile optimized, you will be well ahead of the curve in 2016. Job seekers will find a job on OrlandoJobs.com (or any site you post to) and if they are interested, will go directly to your company website to gain more information from the “source”. If this is not optimized for mobile, you will lose that passive or job curious candidate because they have no other way of gaining more knowledge.
The biggest challenge in 2016 is that once a job seeker hits the “apply” button, they are redirected to your application tracking system that still is not mobile optimized. Only 10% of these redirects ever complete the application, so you lose out big time on a potential candidate. It is almost impossible to fill out an application on an ATS from a cell phone. Until this changes (and ATS companies are working on this issue), your mobile recruiting strategy will have holes in it.
One work-around for the ATS application issue is having code that recognizes that the job seeker is trying to apply via mobile device. Instead of sending them into the application process, it catches an email address and them sends them an email with a link to the application that can be filled out later from a desktop.