Mobile Recruiting--Are You Keeping Up?

First it was social media. Now the new "must" in hiring is mobile. More and more of your clients and customers, including potential employees, are going online with smartphones and tablets. Especially when they're clicking through to sites from emails or tweets.

And you need to ensure you're making it easy for them. Assuming you've included a call to action in your outbound marketing messages, you want readers to act on it right away--because if they don't, only about two percent will reopen the email on another device, such as their computer.

Two percent. Think about it. If your site isn't optimized for mobile, you could be losing 98% of your intended audience right off the bat.

Mobile Numbers Are Climbing

Here are more numbers to consider. According to a recent survey by Knotice, a provider of data management, analytics and digital messaging solutions:

* The number of emails opened on a mobile device (smartphone and/or tablet) during the first half of 2012 overall rose to 36 percent.

* That was a 32 percent increase over the rate from the second half of 2011.

* That number is expected to exceed 50 percent for most brands within the next 6 to 12 months.

Knotice refers to this as the "mobile tipping point." Companies will need to begin planning for a time in the very near future when mobile users will be the majority audience.

Mobile-First Mindset for Recruiting

What matters when it comes to mobile recruiting? Job seekers want efficiency and effectiveness. They want to find a fully functional mobile site that can be accessed instantly and easily, and they want to be able to apply to a job using their smartphones. Does your careers site measure up? If a candidate reads about your job opening on Twitter or through an email, and clicks through to find out more, what will he see?

You don't need a mobile recruiting app. You just need to make sure your careers site is mobile optimized. And it's not complicated. Here are four easy ways to get your mobile recruiting efforts moving in the right direction.

1. Know for yourself how it works.

Just as you walked through your online application process when it was first set up, so should you walk through your mobile careers site on several devices to test its functionality and usability. And test other companies' mobile sites, as well, to see where yours works better or could use some tweaking.

2. Size is everything.

Visit your optimized site on a variety of smartphones and tablets to see whether the screen has to be manipulated. The variety of screen sizes on mobile devices is pretty extensive, and it can be a real pain for on-the-go job seekers to try and zoom in or out, scroll and readjust when viewing. Any extra work for the job seeker is going to cost you quality talent.

3. Use videos.

Video is a great tool for showing potential candidates what your company is all about--especially on mobile, where images trump words. It's really the next best thing to exploring your office and meeting your team in person. And mobile video viewing is on the rise, so your recruitment videos need to be available for that 50 percent who aren't sitting at a computer. Just make sure your videos work!

4. Check for your social share buttons.

Sometimes, the mobile version of a site causes the social sharing buttons to appear at the bottom of a page instead of the side. You need to make sure people can see them. If a reader wants to pass the information along to their networks when on a mobile device, the Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook buttons need to be available, and they need to work. Make sure these are working on all browsers and operating systems to maximize potential referrals.

Still feeling unsure of your mobile recruiting capabilities? Contact Davis Staffing today--we'd be more than happy to set you on the road to mobile recruiting success.