The Mobile Recruiting Train Has Arrived: 5 Tips To Help You Get On Board

It is no longer sufficient to talk how about how mobile phones which shape the recruiting industry over the next few years, without talking about the mobile paradigm shift that is taking place today. We all know the fascinating statistics about smart phone adoption with Nielsen reporting earlier this year that nearly 42% of US mobile users and 44% of European mobile subscribers now use smart-phones.

But it is the data that is beginning to emerge from recruiting sites which is of most interest to me and most illuminating for the recruiting process. For example, one of the UK’s top job aggregators, allthetopbananas.com revealed that in 2010 only 2.8% of its traffic came from mobile devices, and in 2011 a mere 9.8% came from mobile device but in the month of July 2012 this figure has shot up to a massive 30% of their audience accessing their sites via mobile. As well as this, Oil and Gas research has reported a 139% increase in mobile traffic between June 2011 and June 2012. I am confident that most other job related sites are reporting similar trends.

The point is that recruiting is going through the paradigm shift right now. In effect, at this time last year, ‘no-one’ was really accessing jobs through mobile and employers/recruiters could rely on traditional means such as the internet and online social networks to attract talent. You couldn’t accuse them of having deficient recruiting strategies that were ignoring mobile, as mobile was simply was only knocking faintly at the door. But this year everything has changed, mobile recruiting is about to kick the door down and employers and recruiting organization ignore mobile at their peril.

It is time to break the comfortable reliance on on-line sourcing and recruitment methods and shift from the mind set that the typical job seeker is sitting at home on their PC searching and applying for jobs. It is simply no longer the case; they might be shopping, at a friend’s house, on the train to the 100 meter final, (and desperately trying to find a higher paying job to pay for the cost of their Olympic final ticket), sitting in a park, waiting at a bus stop, on a stool in a coffee shop, you name it. They might be anywhere but the comfort of their home office in front of the PC. They might not be back in front of their desk, or any desk for hours, days or even a week, yet this top talent may want to apply for you job and communicate back with you now, while on the move and by using their smart-phones.

So, if job seekers are no longer desk based and becoming increasingly mobile, and if employers want to attract and engage with talent, employers must begin to adopt and optimize their processes to make it easy for job-seekers to learn about them, engage with them, apply for jobs and even interview through smart-phones, and below I have outlined five tips to help you optimize your recruitment process for mobile access.

1. Develop a mobile optimized company career site which is compliant with mobile based browsers and which is designed to present information within a mobile size screen. This may cost some money, but the cost will be comparable to building your original career site, so potentially manageable. The mobile site should be optimized to include much more simplified search functionality, with narrowed search options to minimize the number of clicks to find a job.
2. Incorporate a video tool like HireVue (there are others on the market) into your recruiting process. It enables you to prepare interview questions and send them to candidates on their iPhone and then the candidate can video a response to the questions, and you, the employer or recruiter can view their video interview in your own time from a PC or of course smart-phone. This means that talent can interview on the move if need be.
3. Use a tool like Tungle which allows you, the recruiter, to send interview invites to a candidate’s mobile phone and if they accept, both the interviewee’s and recruiter’s calendars are automatically updated. If you don’t want to use an app, then schedule interviews via text.
4. Once interviews are booked, offer to send candidates directions and details with a link to a simple Google map, and candidates can easily plan their route to interview via their maps app.
5. Think about using an application like Jibe  which is a branded mobile web solution which simplifies the application process for smart-phone users. The system allows users to upload their resume from Google Docs, DropBox, or to simply email one from their own system. But the real beauty of this system is that you can apply with your LinkedIn profile so users can automatically import and submit their LinkedIn profile at the click of the button. This makes applying for jobs from a mobile extremely easy. As well as this, the system can also deliver a set of Yes/No pre-qualification questions that can be easily be answered from a smart phone and feed directly into your ATS.