One in five people owns a smartphone in the United States. It’s suggested that this number will continue to increase and take over the number of desktop users within a year.
But the majority of job seekers using their smartphones and other mobile devices like tablets, a number somewhere around 72% of the job seekers actively seeking employment, still cannot apply for a job from their phone.
Why? Because fewer than 20 percent of U.S. companies have a mobile recruiting strategy in place and those numbers typically stop at the career site level. Forget a working job search for the phone. Even fewer companies have mobile-optimized job posts, which means the applications for those jobs aren’t optimized either.
So when companies look at the number of mobile users in their analytics data and see fewer than eight percent of their traffic on mobile devices, the decision to implement a mobile strategy goes in the trash.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumber than dumb.
Let this sink in a moment: Jobs searches by phone account for nearly 1 billion queries each month.
You’re not seeing those numbers in your analytics because your non-optimized site is chasing those visitors away as soon as they hit your page and see it doesn’t render properly on their device.
Whether you want to accept it or not, optimizing for mobile is next level recruiting. And it’s here. Right now.
If you don’t have a career site that renders on mobile devices, you’re letting nearly 46 percent of visitors go to a competitor who does. Worse, if the jobs on your career site aren’t optimized, that’s another 55 percent turning away. That’s a lot of lost potential and an expensive loss to boot.
The early adopters of mobile are seeing the benefits of an optimized recruiting strategy now. That’s largely because they’re stealing your traffic.
Whether you are a huge corporation or a small business, more and more of your talent pool will arrive by mobile and those individuals will expect a functioning candidate experience from their phone or tablet.
Currently one third of the American workforce is comprised of Millennials. In another five years, that number will include nearly half of all individuals seeking employment. This new generation of job seekers accesses the Internet almost entirely by phone.
When they look for jobs, they almost unanimously go to your corporate site first. And they expect it to be mobile-friendly, including being able to find your jobs and submit an application.
It doesn’t take a huge budget to implement a mobile recruiting strategy that includes an optimized career site, talent community, on-site job search and application process.
What it does take is the foresight to recognize the value of its implementation over the long run. Mobile is here to stay. Time to get on board.
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