Mobile recruiting – what’s it all about ey? This week’s blog focuses on how you can improve your social and mobile recruitment positioning this year. We’ll let you into a secret: It’s all about making it as easy as possible for applicants to find and apply for your jobs.
| What’s the fuss about mobile recruiting? |
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Mobile recruiting kicked off big time last year and as expected has taken to new heights in 2016. Mobile devices have rapidly taken over desktops due to portability and ease of online access. It is no wonder then that the recruitment world has been shaped somewhat by this new technological shift. Job seekers can search for jobs much more discretely and conveniently on their mobiles and tablets than they ever could before. A report by LinkedIn claims that 72% of job seekers in 2015 visited a company website via their mobile device and that 45% of job seekers applied via their mobile device. We can see the shift happening ourselves, so far in 2016 FFROnline (our own Applicant Tracking System) has received 25% of applications from mobile devices. That’s around 16 applications per job vacancy. Imagine if we didn’t have a mobile-friendly site and couldn’t cater to them? |
So how exactly do you cater for this mobile market? Here are our top 3 things you can do to improve your social and mobile recruitment standing:
1. Mobile career page
Enable job seekers to visit your career page via their mobile. Not only will a responsive web page help your website performance and visibility in general (and thus improve business) but since 72% of job seekers are visiting company websites on their mobile devices can you really afford to miss out on this traffic?
As a side note, the mobile site should be an easily navigable miniature version of your current site. So make sure you test it for the user experience – if you struggle to read the jobs on your career site then an applicant won’t have much chance either!
2. Enable mobile CV uploads
Once you’ve got your site available to mobile users, the next step ought to mirror the next part of the recruitment process: job advert > apply. You need to address the application process – can an applicant apply to your job directly from their mobile or do they have to follow the process on their desktop (think of the high drop off rate here)?
There are a number of ways applicants can get their CV to you from their mobile devices. Document hosting platforms such as DropBox or iCloud are really useful for storing documents like CVs and Cover Letters. Newer mobile devices now also have Word software already downloaded which was the initial problem with mobile applications in 2014 and 15.
Whatever you do make sure your application process doesn’t include a lengthy application form! Firstly, applicants want a quick process and secondly, you can’t fill out fiddly little boxes on a mobile – it’s just impractical. A simple submit a CV is all you need initially – if you do need any further information then you can address this in a telephone pre-screen later on.
3. Take your recruitment social
A final thing you can do to enhance your social media recruiting efforts is to get your jobs on social media platforms too. Let’s quickly have a look at some figures:
Facebook - 40.7 million UK users (86% of Britain’s total digital population)
Twitter – 21.6 million UK users
Linkedin – 20.7 million UK users
Google+ - 20.2 million UK users
So there’s a lot of people in the UK using social media, this probably isn’t newsworthy, however, what if we told you that of the 40.7 million Facebook users, 30.5 million of these users, access the site via a mobile device? This is phenomenal – not only do social sites have incredibly high numbers of traffic (from your desired candidate pools) but they also access these sites on their mobiles. So it makes total recruitment sense to advertise your jobs here. We also recommend that you start to get a bit creative too as most people are now engaging with pictures and videos more than written content check out Recruitment and Memes and Creative Recruitment campaigns for some ideas.
If you liked this, we think you’d also be interested in these social and mobile articles:
• The Why and How of Mobile Recruitment
• Top 5 Ways to use Social Media for Recruitment
• Cool Tools and Apps to help you Social Recruit
