Join our interactive webinar talking mobile recruiting this Thursday. Hear from our experts about mobile recruiting in our 5/22/14 webinar at 11 AM EST. Click here to learn more. Last week during our mobile recruiting week I received a number emails from a number of individuals who have told me that they believe that mobile recruiting is a complete waste of time and money. It’s a sham they tell me, and something I shouldn’t be telling recruiting teams to be considering.
Mobile Recruitment is a Vendor Play
The argument is that real numbers just don’t support that recruiting teams should adopt mobile, and the statistics like the ones bulleted in the list below are purely a marketing play to drive perceived awareness and white paper downloads making mobile recruiting mainstream.
The key to any recruiting strategy, mobile or not is to do your homework, test the waters and educate yourself on your own candidate audience before implementing a strategy or purchasing any type of software. This goes for mobile recruiting. Recruiters and business leaders should talk to their candidates from past, present and future before adopting any new type of program, pilot or strategy. And that includes mobile recruiting. The real story behind mobile recruiting isn’t a themed week or a catchy headline to drive views. What matters in recruiting is really the story that is told through analytics, metrics and measurements starting with your own candidate web traffic to your career page, job posting or talent community. As I mentioned last week, you first must understand your audience and the metrics behind web traffic before you implement a mobile recruiting strategy. Recruiters need to get access to their Google Analytics numbers to understand their own web traffic visitors. Recruiters should also be demanding metrics and numbers behind the social recruiting sites, job boards and other communities to decide the most cost effective way to spend their money.
Job Boards Fail Horribly When It Comes to Mobile
One emailer told me, “We are seeing less than 15% of <mobile page views> the total. While that number has been on the increase, it is far from the other reported numbers.” So of course, this guy or gal thinks mobile recruiting is a sham. Problem is he/she works in the job board industry where sites outside of a handful are not mobile friendly, rendering or enabled. They are horrible to search or even view job postings with a small mobile screen. I’m not surprised that no one’s visiting job boards using a mobile device because frankly their mobile experience is downright shitty. Forty-eight percent of job seekers report to having problems entering text into mobile employment applications and job boards via a mobile device. Imagine what this number is like for people on sites who aren’t mobile enabled. I’m thinking it’s 98%. But those job boards that do like LinkedIn (yes, I consider them a job board) and Glassdoor have developed apps, tools and an experience that makes mobile connecting and the job search easy. Mobile is only a waste of time if your audience isn’t using mobile, but maybe the real reason why you aren’t seeing mobile traffic is because your current experience is driving mobile users away like the plague. Hear from our experts about mobile recruiting in our 5/22/14 webinar at 11 AM EST. Click here to learn more.
One Comment
I concur that there is a ton of fluff and vendor-speak around mobile recruiting. I like to lean on the facts. The facts we’re seeing in this case are that 19% of the last 100K unique job page views on our platform were from a mobile device. These visitors came primarily from aggregators, social sites, and email sharing.
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