What is required of nearly EVERY licensed or credentialed professional on an annual basis? The answer is continuing education. From physicians to electricians, most professionals are required to perform a prescribed number of CEU hours to maintain their licenses and certifications. These professionals desire CE activities that are relevant, convenient, and accredited, but quite often, it’s a challenge to quickly find such activities, especially from a geographic standpoint. Here is where the opportunity lies.

Leveraging Continuing Education to Strengthen Mobile Recruitment Strategy

Your mobile recruiting app serves as a marketing tool and traffic generator to your ATS. If “passives” within your market discover that your mobile recruiting app is also a solid resource for relevant CE activities, it increases the chances of download, and more importantly, utilization. Of course a percentage of these passives would naturally peek over into the jobs listings within your app. Bingo.

Continuing education is a multi-billion dollar business. You yourself may be an HR professional in need of HCRI accredited CE activities to maintain your HRBP or HRMP certification. A pharmacist in Massachusetts for example is required to perform 30 hours of continuing education every two years. These required 30 hours are typically earned through one or two hour activities, via various formats including live seminars, webinars, online, workbook, etc.

What does this mean from a recruitment marketing “content” standpoint? Employers are always looking for a competitive edge when it comes to recruitment marketing content, especially within competitive markets, and when recruiting highly experienced professionals. Historically, content such as salary data, resume writing tips, interview tips, and market news, have been used, and to varying degrees of success. Continuing education activities make great content, and are highly relevant to passive job seekers.

Leveraging continuing education activities for recruiting (or marketing) purposes is nothing new, and incorporating CE activities into your mobile recruiting app is a simple and hands-off process. Your app could simply import individual activities real-time from a resource such as www.CESearchEngine, or you could add buttons pointing to a handful of online activity catalogs of university partners and trusted CE providers within your market. It’s an easy win.

Since an ever increasing amount of professionals are taking activities on their mobile devices, below are five benefits of listing relevant CE activities within your mobile recruiting app.

Mobile App “Stickiness”

Getting professionals to download your recruiting app is a challenge, and getting them to keep your app after they find a job is a greater challenge. Inclusion of continuing education activity listings within your mobile app would:

• make your app more desirable to download

• increase mobile app open rates

• help minimize app deletions, even after the individual has landed a job

Strengthen University Relationships

Are university relationships important to your recruiting strategy? Since the continuing education market is highly competitive, including a partner university’s CE activities into your mobile app would greatly help the university from a marketing perspective, and would go a long way in strengthening that relationship.

Perceived Innovation

How many employers are promoting continuing education activities along with their jobs? Some, but not many. Your company would be perceived as an innovator within your market. Odds are, your company would be the first to do so in your geographic region or business sector, and being first has its benefits regarding positive PR.

Message to the Market

Incorporating continuing education activities within your app would send a strong message to the market regarding your company’s dedication and commitment to professional development.

Support of Your Internal Continuing Education Department

Many companies and health systems have internal CE departments that develop activities for both employees as well as non-employees. Promoting the department’s CE within your recruiting app would support the department, their mission, and your institution.