5 Ways To Use Mobile To Recruit Top Talent

by Meghan Biro

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 FB +0.43%, Twitter, LinkedIn LNKD -0.53% and other social networks are HR powerhouses. Fully 70 percent of iPhone and Android users visit Facebook 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 everyday. 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.

Excerpt from “5 Ways to Use Mobile to Recruit Top Talent.”  Originally posted on Forbes.com.