Mobile is becoming more important in recruiting every passing day. With more and more cell phone users choosing SmartPhones, mobile is quickly becoming an important part of any recruitment marketing strategy.

The question for most recruiting organizations, however, is to understand in what ways they should leverage mobile technologies to get the most out of this new channel. Here are my thoughts on what I think are important regarding future mobile recruiting strategy.

Use as a Recruiting Channel - Mobile should be used as a recruiting channel through SMS (text messaging) and you should start using it today. Not only do mobile users check SMS more often than they do their email accounts (enabling your organization to quickly ascertain how effective your messaging is for a new job position for your Talent Network) but mobile is becoming a larger part of how people search the web in general.

Use as a Sourcing Channel - With recruiters on the go, you want to provide them the ability to source qualified candidates anywhere into your recruitment CRM. Since they should always have their mobile phones on them, this is a great vehicle to add qualified candidates to your Talent Network whenever your recruiters come across them (career fairs, networking events, business trips, etc.)

Utilize phone applications – Phone apps are becoming more prevalent not only on iPhones but on Androids and Blackberry’s as well. From a recruiting perspective, I see applications having two major impacts. First, job boards have or will create applications for iPhones and Androids for use by job seekers and employers. You therefore need to identify job boards that offer good mobile apps as well as see what the job boards you already have relationships with do with mobile.

Second, there are apps out there such as location based games like Foursquare & SCVNGR that could be great opportunities to source new talent. There are tons of new apps launched every day and you need to keep updated with the ones that are out there in the marketplace that could provide tremendous opportunities for recruiting.

Mobile version of your career site - There has been a lot of talk about creating mobile versions of your career site. While I wouldn’t say I’m against creating a mobile site, I encourage employers to focus on creating a better career site before they create an additional mobile version. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Phones are becoming more impressive in the browsers they have to view web pages. It has gotten to the point where viewing a non-mobile website is pretty easy. (I even prefer viewing regular web pages rather than their mobile versions on my Android.)
2. Having a mobile version of your career site requires you to update both your career site and the mobile version whenever you make changes. So make sure you have the resources to upkeep both.
3. Personally, I feel there are a good deal of other recruiting initiatives that you can undertake with your resources that can have a greater impact on your recruiting (especially the other mobile initiatives above). You need to decide for your organization which initiatives take precedent.

Mobile Recruiting is something you need to include in your recruiting strategy. Decide where you think the future of mobile is going and start implementing plans for incorporating it into your recruiting efforts.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.