Find out what you need to do today to recruit tomorrow’s top team members — in the format they’ll use to find you.
Mobile phone use certainly isn’t new. As of January 2014, 90 percent of Americans owned a cell phone, according to the Pew Research Center.
Ninety-three percent of U.K. adults owned and used a mobile phone, as of the first quarter of 2014, according to U.K. communications industry regulator Ofcom; and Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association data showed that Canada had more than 28,483,308 cell service subscribers, as of 2015’s first quarter.
Mobile phones may not be uncommon, but they haven’t always been synonymous with recruiting — until now.
Fifty-five percent of more than 1,800 recruiters who participated in software-as-a-service provider Jobvite’s annual Social Recruiting Survey said they plan to use a mobile career site to support their recruiting efforts[EB1] .
A number of the recruiters that already have a mobile recruiting site in place have seen a reduction in the time it takes to hire new candidates and found it’s helped them find better quality job candidates.
If you aren’t currently familiar with the term mobile recruiting, with almost 90 percent of job seekers using their mobile device to search for jobs, your organization had better be — soon.
The following four tips can help you fully understand and learn how to utilize mobile recruiting technology:
1. Embrace phone- and tablet-friendly design. Have you ever tried to look at a website on your smartphone and found that, on the smaller screen, the text was hard to read, things seem to be running off the page — and the links were nearly impossible to click? That’s because the company didn’t use responsive design, which helps website elements translate to a handheld device.
If your organization used responsive design techniques when it created your company’s website, the text and other elements should look roughly the same (or, at the very least, readable) when viewed on a smaller screen. (Test it on your smartphone or tablet to find out.)
Also take a look at any recruitment pages on your company website. Periodically checking your site’s career section, even if responsive design was used, is always a good idea to make sure the information translates well to a handheld device.
Having a tablet- and phone-friendly website is important. If text and other elements are hard to read, potential candidates may get frustrated — and log off before you’ve connected with them.
If your web team didn’t create your site with responsive design in mind, you have another option: Create a new, more condensed version of your company’s website specifically for mobile use.
Your basic mobile site pages can differ from the career pages on your main website, according to Monster; the two sites don’t have to be identical. You can keep any images, text or other items that will work on mobile devices, and disregard the ones that won’t. Mobile sites are often much less complex than company websites. Some are just a few pages. Your goal should be to create a site that conveys important information in an easy-to-read format.
2. Let candidates apply online. Make sure your mobile site (and your company’s main site — particularly if you don’t have a separate mobile site) includes functionality to let job candidates submit an application. CIO magazine recommends making it as easy as possible for candidates to apply via your mobile site — which can be particularly helpful if someone can’t view social media or other sites at work and instead uses a cell phone to peruse job openings.
3. Use mobile recruiting to help create talent pipelines. Adding a sign-up option on your mobile site will let you send updates to candidates who have indicated they want to learn about openings at your organization — helping you, according to Inc., keep a growing list of talent you can tap when the need arises.
4. Don’t worry about creating a fancy app. Apps can provide some unique, interesting features, but need to rely on candidates to manually update the information from time to time, which could be especially challenging with passive talent who aren’t consistently looking for a new job.
Even more importantly, though, apps take time to build. If your site doesn’t feature responsive design, and you don’t have a mobile device-friendly site, you need to get one up and running as soon as possible. Stick to the basics: Concise job descriptions, the ability to submit an email or resume for more information and a compelling description of your company.
Mobile recruiting efforts don’t have to operate separately from social media recruiting.
With more than 80 percent of jobseekers using Facebook, according to Jobvite, and 73 percent of recruiters having hired a candidate through social media, it seems tying your mobile recruiting plan to your social media recruiting work would be a wise strategy.
If your organization could use some Facebook and LinkedIn inspiration, our recent blog post on smarter social media recruiting can provide some tips on finding and reaching out to potential job candidates on social media.