Your phone gets more of your attention than anything else in your day. On average, people stop what they are doing to check their phones 221 times, starting around 7:30 in the morning.
It starts with email then moves to what else, Facebook. Weather is in there, some news, maybe some banking, a text here or there. Much of this can happen before ever getting out of bed.
At least this is what Tecmark found in their study released yesterday.
It’s not really that surprising. Smartphones have made going online faster and more accessible. It’s certainly quicker than booting up a desktop or waiting on your laptop to load.
For older generations – Xers, Boomers and those in their Golden years – who still haven’t fully grasped the desktop, let alone a laptop or tablet, the phone has had slow adoption. Bur for the younger Millennials and Gen Z crowd, the kids who grew up with smartphones, they are used to consuming information on the phone and are more or less shaped by technology.
According to Nielsen, over 85% of Generation Y (Millennials) own smartphones. It’s an everyday staple of their lives and you can bet part of their daily ritual will be to look for jobs on the phone.
In 2014 alone, Millennials make up 36% of the American workforce. They have solid social media skills so you know you can’t go wrong with putting your jobs on sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. In fact, Millenials are more likely to share your jobs with friends than any other group.
But more so, Millennials, about 86% of them, are more likely to go directly to your corporate website to see what your culture is about.
Wouldn’t it be great if your corporate website worked on the phone? What if your talent community, referral program, job search and application process did as well? Oh man, you would make some Gen Y job seekers very happy.
Heck, you might even capture some of those older folks. To think, all that potential….
If only you had a viable recruiting strategy for the phone. Being that it’s almost 2015, you still have time. By 2020, it’s estimated that Generation Y will occupy almost 50% of the workforce.
But you don’t want to wait until then.
With so many smartphone owners today, young and old, you can bet job seekers are already trying to use their phones to find your jobs and apply. The percentages might be small currently, but you can be sure they are out there.
Whether you make it possible now or wait another five years could make all the difference in how your brand is perceived, especially by this “Gimme now” generation.
Millennials have high expectations of things going their way and going their way quickly. This goes for job hunting. They don’t want to sit at a cold table in a lifeless conference room filling in an application for an hour. The same for sitting at home in front of a desktop. They want to do it from wherever they happen to be at the moment, from their phone. Because that’s how their life works.
Everything is mobile and Millennials expect nothing less from a job application.
If you aren’t in the driver seat with a mobile recruiting strategy, you’re going to be left a hitchhiker on the side of the road as these kids pass your company by and apply to the organization who has recognized the importance of mobile adoption.
One more thing to note in considering a mobile apply option. While Millennials are stereotyped as lazy, self-entitled narcissists, they also have been found to stay with one company longer than previous generations.
Just sayin’…
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