If you’re in talent acquisition, you’ve no doubt been beat over the head with the notion that you should be implementing a mobile strategy in your recruiting. Well, let me add one more blow for good measure. You not only need mobile in your recruitment strategy, you need to make sure your platform is accessible from all devices: desktop, smartphone and tablet.
Even with tablet sales slowing, they are still being used, so don’t ignore them. And desktop certainly isn’t going anywhere. Not yet, at least.
As for smartphones, Jibe research finds 80 percent of job seekers expect to be able to find your jobs from a smartphone, while 70 percent are willing to apply from one.
Those figures are huge considering there are 146 million mobile job seekers in the U.S. That puts the numbers around 117 million searching on their phone and 102 million ready to apply.
However, while many of these folks use their mobile devices exclusively in their day-to-day activities online, there are still those who bounce between devices, say, starting their search on a phone then moving to a desktop to apply. Those people are just as significant.
In other words, it’s not enough to implement mobile without considering how it will be accessed from the rest of your recruiting platform. If you have a career site that is not optimized for phone view then it’s unlikely that a candidate will click through to your jobs, which have been.
On the converse, if you have mobile apply in place and it’s not responsive to the desktop – meaning you get a narrow phone view on your monitor – you are going to provide a poor experience for applicants.
Recruiting over the Internet has been a thing now for about fifteen years. A lot has changed over that time: connection speeds, recruiting platforms, social media, and now mobile.
Yet recruiting itself is well behind the eight ball. Mobile recruiting has only been a thing for a few years now. But there are stats over stats about the rise of mobile usage and how it’s supplanted desktop usage in a short time.
And for some reason, it has taken a long time to reach the recruiting industry. I believe it’s mostly because companies just don’t know where to start. Setting up a multi-screen experience requires mobile adoption. It requires you to optimize your conversion funnel for entry from any device: from first visit, to return visit, to midstream device change.
Because there is no clear solution in making the changeover, it requires the involvement of your IT department or, if you don’t have an IT department, an outside consultant. You’ll want folks who know what they are doing and know how best to do it in a cost-effective fashion so you don’t miss a beat in your recruitment strategy.
I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention that HealthComm has more than a decade of experience in creating digital recruiting tools, including creating, developing, and deploying multi-device recruiting platforms that integrate company branding as well as fit with your ATS, to provide a comprehensive candidate experience from any device.
We’ve dedicated a lot of time and resources in that decade plus to perfecting the tools that make entry into your hiring funnel as easy as possible, whether it’s converting your existing platform or building a custom platform from scratch.
Sales pitch aside, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not looking into adopting a multi-screen experience for candidates. Early adopters are seeing success with the conversion, including our own clients. Even Google will make responsive design a ranking factor in its algorithm, penalizing sites that aren’t responsive, starting April 21, 2015.
Responsive design, by the way, is the technical term for multi-screen experience.
The digital world is well past making the move to mobile. And it’s well into incorporating a responsive, multi-screen approach. It’s important that your company transition as quickly as possible if you’re still on the fence. Not only are you doing a disservice to your candidates and your recruiting efforts; you’re hurting your employer brand by not appearing up to date with today’s technology.
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