Earlier this week, I examined one of the more important topics regarding mobile recruiting, which is how to make your Career Site more mobile friendly. With the two main methods explored being the Smartphone App vs. the mSite.

In this post, I want to explore a few ways that I’ve come across that can help your recruiters use their phone to more easily and effectively source talent and enable candidates to start a relationship with your organization.

While the number of mobile sourcing options available to recruiters is growing by the day, here are a few ways that your organization can utilize mobile to find great talent today:

Mobile Talent Network Forms:  As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, the Career Site is a great portal for all your jobs and recruiting content and making it optimized for mobile users is important.  Along with this, the Career Site also represents a great way to begin building your Talent Network through simple opt-in Forms.

On every page of your Career Site having a simple opt-in process that enables candidates to provide contact info so that they can receive targeted job alerts and recruiting content is a must.  This provides a low maintenance way to start building those pipelines in your CRM database.  While you will need to build out and work to provide targeted jobs and great recruiting content to these opt-in candidates it can be a great way to engage with quality candidates that have an interest in your organization.

These forms need to look good and be functional on both your website as well as when mobile users opt-in in on their phone.  This is especially important as this may be the only option for mobile candidates as technologies catch up with making the job application mobile friendly.

SMS: SMS / text message can be a great way to not only source talent but to communicate with targeted groups as well.  Whether it’s having candidates text their email address to a custom number to launch a trigger campaign or sending a mobile Talent Network form to candidates who show interest, SMS can be a quick way to communicate and interact with candidates especially at events such as Career Fairs and Networking receptions.

Once candidates are in your Talent Network, SMS can be used to communicate targeted job positions to candidates.  The key is to make sure you understand candidate interests so your job positions match what they are looking for.  If it doesn’t it will be seen as spam really fast.  The other benefit of SMS is that people tend to check text messages within the first minute or 2 of receiving it so you can ensure quick response.

QR Codes: QR Codes are becoming a popular device for marketing and recruiting professionals and can be a great way for candidates to interact with your recruiting ads.  Whether at a Career Fair or through a print ad, QR Codes provide a quick way to direct candidates to Talent Network forms or job listings on the Career Site.

I’ve heard some really cool things being done with QR codes in the service industry with print ads centered in malls around part-time employment opportunities.

Mobile Apps:  While I won’t go too deeply into this, there are a number of great tools to use on your mobile phone to find and source talent.  I could mention some tools that you can use, however, I will instead point you to Shannon Van Curen’s presentation “The Sound of Mobile Sourcing” from SourceCon that lists a number of useful mobile tools.  As she does a better job than I could.

The number of ways to source talent via mobile phones is rising by the day giving recruiters the power to source great talent whenever they find it.  The key is making it easy for recruiters to not only source but to make sure all the talent they find makes it into their centralized database from where they can engage with this talent.

This is an exciting time for recruitment technology and mobile will be a large part in how recruiters excel in finding the right talent for their organizations.

How will you leverage mobile in your recruiting strategy?  Share your thoughts with me on Twitter @smashfly.