The social recruiting hype went huge and has not burst, but mobile has followed a stealth, almost, cult adoption. Over the next 12 months the continued convergence of mobile and social will catapult mobile to the front of recruiters’ minds.
As an industry, recruitment is suffering the growing pains of mobile web. You know you need to support mobile, and reap the rewards of the powerful digital marketing and engagement channel, but it is not clear what the objective is, or how to go about it.
Is mobile the ultimate connectivity tool providing employer information and candidate communication? Or is it the new way to apply for jobs? Maybe it is the next best referral tool? Perhaps it is the ideal back-office device allowing the candidate database to be carried in your pocket! Perhaps the true jackpot mobile recruiting solution is still waiting to be discovered.
Recent research shows that 31% of the global $5.3 billion mobile advertising spend is to achieve market presence, while 25% is for lead generation. If recruitment followed the same pattern, this would be 31% for employer branding and 25% to attract applications; but today most companies have pushed mobile off the agenda in place of social media. The problem with this typical approach is social media is rapidly morphing into mobile!
When recruiters first started to experiment with social media the challenge was around what candidates wanted. On mobile the problem is not what do candidates want to do via mobile, because the answer to this is very easy — everything and anything! We only need to look at other sectors such as finance, retail, classifieds, vouchers, restaurants, travel, healthcare, education, publishing, etc. to realize that the user already knows the power of their handset. It is the recruitment industry which is slow to fulfil the candidate demand.
The recruitment industry’s difficulty is that today’s candidate processing workflows and systems are not always mobile friendly. This is no shock, as they were designed to solve a different problem: mass volume of resumes sent by email.
My final thought is a question posed to each reader: How long is it before you start focusing on mobile web as a recruitment channel? Via email and your website, your candidates are already finding new jobs via mobile with you, but the experience is not good. The recruiting industry is lagging far behind other industries when it comes to maximizing potential returns from the mobile Internet