One of the biggest disruptions for marketing and recruiting professionals over the past few years has been the emergence of mobile as a platform. It makes sense. Potential customers and qualified candidates are connected constantly with their smartphones and it’s integral for organizations are able to engage with candidates at any time they decide to while presenting them with a unique experience for the device they use.
However, it wouldn’t be a disruption without presenting challenges. First, our messaging can’t be a direct port to the mobile device and there needs to be thought on streamlining our messaging for smaller screens and devices. Second, mobile interactions tend to be shorter, necessitating the need for easier sign up processes and ways to opt-in for future engagement. Third, the mobile experience while different should have synergy with your desktop experience in terms of brand and messaging. It’s up to organizations to create unique experiences for different devices while maintaining a similar tone and feel.
So where do you start implementing mobile recruiting? What areas are the most critical to focus on? Here are 5 areas that should be a particular interest for your organization:
Career Site
Your Career Site is the most integral recruiting asset to focus on when implementing your mobile recruiting strategy. Candidates that visit your site from a mobile device (either directly or from 3rd party sources) should receive a unique, streamlined experience. They should be able to easily learn about your company, find relevant job opportunities and opt-in to further engagement all from an experience that fits your organization and brand. It should also be optimized for SEO.
Today, for many of the organizations we work with, mobile represents around 20% of overall Career Site traffic. A number we fully expect to increase in the near future.
Application Process
As candidates more frequently learn about and find jobs via their mobile devices, it’s important to understand how it affects your apply flow and that you have realistic expectations for job seekers looking to apply from a mobile device.
First and foremost, I would take a step back and look at your application process as a whole. Is it feasible for candidates to complete your application via a mobile device? Consider current technology, time to complete an application, the need for a resume and other factors in your evaluation. If your application takes an hour to complete, having a mobile version may not lead to as many applications as you expect due to the time commitment needed. And requiring a resume could encourage candidates to save and finish the application on a device where they can easily upload their resume.
Once you take a look at your process and determine it to be prudent to provide this mobile experience, it’s time to look at your technology. Your ATS is a logical place to start and depending on the ATS, you will most likely have options to create a mobile apply flow. If you need a more targeted solution, I would then take a look at the various Mobile Apply applications that are available. In either case, it’s important to understand the information you need to make a decision and customize a mobile experience that is optimized while compliant with your needs in the ATS.
Capture
As part of the mobile Career Site and application process, I highly encourage you look at solutions that help you capture candidates directly in the apply flow. At this stage, high drop off rates (can be as high as 80%) plague the application process especially for mobile. And you want something to show for all the hard work you’ve done on your Career Site and in choosing your marketing sources.
Solutions like Recruitment Marketing Platforms and CRM can help you bake this into your process and begin building targeted Talent Pipelines in your desktop and mobile apply flow. It ensures that candidates that drop off are captured in your process and that necessary engagement can occur to nurture these candidates for future positions. You will also be able to send reminders to these candidates to apply for the position they started to apply for to boost applicant flow.
Mobile is also important in how you capture candidates at events. Leveraging mobile forms to capture candidate information offers a way to better group and communicate to candidates post event. Using workflows, candidates can be passed into a CRM into pre-determined pipelines based on the information provided so communication can be customized to their specific skills and level of interest.
Engagement
Another great aspect of mobile is the immediate engagement that it provides. For example, text messages are typically read in the 1st minute of receipt. Compared to email which is typically in hours. Leveraging SMS and mobile messaging in your recruitment campaigns is a way to quickly test messaging and get immediate feedback on the demand for certain opportunities.
Mobile also provides a way to better engage candidates in person. With QR codes, your organization can create content that can be consumed on a mobile device whether it’s employment branding videos, custom landing pages or other content and messaging. Think about the normal procedure at network events. Instead of having candidates just wait in line and read a generic flyer on your organization, you can provide a QR code that directs them to videos of your employees and the specific jobs that they perform at your organization. It’s a much more compelling way to tell your story to candidates.
Analytics
Recruiting analytics are imperative to have across your entire recruitment marketing strategy. From job boards and other channels to social to CRM engagement to your Career Site, your organization needs to centrally measure the effectiveness and performance of all your campaigns. And with mobile, it’s becoming more important to understand how these sources are affected by the device used as well. While the tracking is similar, it adds other questions that you’ll want measured.
So when you look at mobile’s affect on your strategy, there are a number of areas to consider. What % of candidates visit your Career Site from their desktop, mobile device or tablet? What operating systems are most used for mobile visits? How many contacts am I capturing in the mobile apply process? How many applicants and hires? Where is traffic coming from for mobile visits (referral sites, organic traffic, direct)?
As we move forward, it will increasingly become important to not only understand your recruiting analytics from a global level but also with a lens based on device used. While mobile is a smaller percentage of all traffic today for most organizations, it’s one that will continue to grow in the future.
Are You Mobile Ready?
The impact of mobile is not felt in just one area in your recruiting strategy but impacts how you engage, message and implement across your entire strategy. We need to plan for a multi-device strategy and ensure the experience is consistent and optimized for every interaction with our candidates.
