These days, desktops and laptops are starting to seem like relics from an earlier age. Mobile rules. Any company that isn’t using mobile for recruitment and referrals is in real danger of losing out on top talent.
Here’re a few quick stats to give you a clearer picture:
77 percent of job seekers use mobile job search apps in their job search;
81 percent of employees use their personal mobile devices for work;
23 percent of keyword searches that contain the word “job” come from mobile devices.
It’s clear that mobile is the new HR frontier. Mobile is where top talent goes when it’s looking for a gig. And it’s where smart companies are increasing their presence, including Intel, Match.com, and Pepsi. The imperative is clear: up your mobile recruiting and referral presence or risk being an also-ran in the talent hunt.
Here Are 5 Ways To Fully Exploit The Mobile Marketplace In Your Recruiting Efforts:
1) Invest in a great interface. Your career site must be designed to be mobile friendly from start to finish. Remember, your mobile interface is the first thing many applicants see — it’s a reflection of your company and culture. You want it to be appealing, honest and easy to navigate. This not only ups the number of top-flight applicants, it ups referrals. People who may not be right for a current opening may well refer someone who is.
2) Streamline the career application process. Mobile lends itself to action. Especially for the initial phase of recruiting and filtering candidates, make the application process fun. Don’t force this, and always stay true to your workplace culture, but within those parameters make the process easy and engaging.
3) Use social networks. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks are HR powerhouses. Fully 70 percent of iPhone and Android users visitFacebook on their devices and there are over 2 million jobs listed on Facebook’s Social Job Partnership application. Twitter can spread word of a great job like wildfire. LinkedIn, of course, is the ultimate mobile recruiting tool. It’s a great marketplace where talent and HR meet, assess each other, and if the match is right, partner.
4) Use the mobile tools. Mobile is the perfect platform for gamification, videos, and rewards. It’s all about engagement and personalization. Get the people who will be working with the new recruit involved in the hiring process. Videos are a great way to do this – a potential coworker talking about your organization and what the job entails is worth a thousand words of description.
5) Know mobile’s limits. Mobile is a priceless recruiting and referral tool, but to seal the deal you need personal contact. HR is about filtering and attracting top people, so once mobile has connected your enterprise with talent, pick up the phone and make human-to-human contact. There is no bigger booster of HR technology than me, but there is a danger in over-reliance on it. You want to meet people in person and bring them into your organization before you hire them.
Mobile is only going to grow in the years to come. It’s exciting technology – there’s a reason billions of people use mobile every day. Be savvy in exploiting it for your recruiting and referral process when hiring new talent. Bring in outside if you need to. Get this right and talent will flow your way.
A version of this post was first published on Forbes.
Photo Credit: TechStage via Compfight cc
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