Anastasia SvyrydenkoEven if you live under a rock, in the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by a desert wasteland, you still know that recruiting is now a mobile game.
The average person will spend over four hours on their devices each day. If you assume the recommended eight hours of sleep, this means that 25 percent of a peron’s waking day is spent on a mobile device. The majority of this time is eaten up by browsing social media (over two hours, according to Statista) and firing off an endless stream of texts (almost a half hour each day).
That said, people do use their mobile devices for more practical tasks as well, including searching for jobs. A 2014 study performed by Censuswide, and funded by Indeed.com, found that 65 percent of people were using mobile devices while looking for new jobs. This number grew as high as 77 percent in younger age brackets.
This is a staggering majority that cannot be overlooked by recruiters. Mobile recruiting, while still a relatively new trend, is a vital branch that needs to be incorporated into any company’s hiring strategy.
Unfortunately, the infancy of this trend means that recruiters are still forming their understanding of the best practices when approaching mobile users with career opportunities. To help facilitate that learning, here are three mistakes that organizations need to avoid when approaching mobile recruitment.
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1. Failing To Adapt Job Posts To The Mobile Environment
Convenience is one of the most common reasons cited for job seekers turning to mobile. The same Censuswide, Indeed.com survey found that convenience was the number one motivator for mobile job searchers. That convenience is severely damaged when recruiters fail to adapt their job posts to the mobile environment. With smaller screens and touch navigation, mobile users have vastly different browsing behaviors from desktop applicants.
Your mobile recruitment posts need to provide the necessary information to entice applicants and ensure that they understand the position, its duties, and the requirements. But, too much information is overwhelming for mobile users that are staring at a much smaller screen. Not to mention, these individuals have notoriously short attention spans.
UPS has been a leader in online recruiting for nearly two decades. Realizing that browsing social media and watching videos are two of the most common mobile activities, they made sure to target Facebook and Twitter users with job posts and incorporate videos, instead of large blocks of text, in their job descriptions. This allowed them to reduce hiring costs from $600-700 to just $60-70.
2. Lacking A Mobile Career Portal
Alongside their social media and video-enabled mobile recruitment, UPS also leverages a mobile app designed to be a communication channel between the company and applicants. Both sides find value from this addition to mobile recruiting. Applicants can ask questions and receive additional information vital to their hiring.
UPS, on the other hand, can use these initial conversations to more accurately target the right employees for interviews. This has had a dramatic impact on improving their interview-hire ratio to 2:1.
In short, offering some mobile career portal, or app, that enhances your mobile recruitment is a huge advantage. This is especially true with younger applicants in the millennial generation because these job seekers are so mobile-centric.
3. Forgetting to Track Results
Data has become an invaluable and unavoidable tool in today’s always-connected world. We’re producing data at absolutely wonky rates. In one report from 2017, there was a total of 2.7 Zettabytes of data in the “digital universe.” Translated into gigabytes, let’s say it is a lot of zeroes, with more being added every second.
If you ask your marketing department how much they use data to inform decisions, they’ll likely talk your ear off. So, why not incorporate data into your mobile recruitment strategies? If you aren’t continually testing your job postings, in terms of message and channel, then how will you determine what’s working? Mobile users search differently, which means they may be using different keywords than expected to find job posts.
Google’s People Analytics team (a Google-ized name for their HR department) used data from their past interviews to determine what questions and practices in their hiring process yielded high-performing employees. They found that specific tactics, which they long presumed were effective, actually added no value to the equation. Thus, they removed them from their hiring tactics.
So…
These mistakes can be crippling to mobile recruiting, but they are very avoidable. By spending more time analyzing your mobile recruitment efforts and creating hiring experiences that are designed for the mobile user, you’ll see more, qualified applicants entering your onboarding process.
Lee Ann Prescott
