Recruiting Must Factor in Smart Phones

In an article today published on ere.net, Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett discuss Recruiting’s blunder of epic proportions, not connecting with mobil... They provide the example of a guy named Joe, who checks all aspects of his life on his smart phone before getting out of bed, continues to do so on the subway, and throughout his day. Joe has blown off company ABC’s traditional recruitment efforts, including email and In-mail, because he doesn’t know ABC company, and he isn’t looking for a job! Then Joe’s friend Dave, who used to work for ABC, tweets him about the job, and on his way home he decides to take a look (still on the smart phone), but ABC’s career page isn’t optimized for mobile, and it doesn’t come up right. He tries the company main page, but, no career link there, so he gives up and goes back to catching up on FB updates.

Sullivan and Burnett go on to describe how corporate America is losing the war for talent with this simple blunder of not reaching the smart phone user. Only 8 of the Fortune 100 have Mobile career sites, and many others make their career pages hard to find. They also provide suggestions on how to fix it. If we want to recruit the passive job seeker, we have to get with it. More and more young people will be living their lives on smart phones, and we don’t want to miss them!

For more insights, be sure to visit The Headhunter's Secret Guide!

Comment by Ryan Leary on October 13, 2011 at 6:31pm: Mobile is not ready yet. I was speaking to someone last week about this very topic and yes I agree that mobile is big but it's not everywhere.

It's place in recruiting at this point and time is with mobile optimized sites. This point was made to me in that conversation and I agree. In a year or 2 it may be different.

Now we do run mobile campaigns for our clients and they are expensive. The reach is big but the return not so much.

Sourcing apps...eh <-- Are you going to seriously source candidates on a 3 inch screen? I'm not. The apps are cute but in real life not so sure it work just yet.

With that being said ATS systems with mobile ability is different. Process work, pushing approvals, HM's logging in to send email and/or push candidates through the system: There are many options in this area. But that is not recruiting. That's Talent Acquisition. Different ball game.

Great Topic.

Comment by Rob Rennells on October 19, 2011 at 10:13pm: I work for one of the largest health care systems in the state of Wisconsin and we are in the process or tring to make our site mobile friendly. Ultimately we have determined that it wont be necessary for us to make the online application mobile friendly at this point, but we do need the site to work enough so that candidates can at least get to know the organization and convince them that they want to look into it further.

we are located in Central Wisconsin and from what we can tell there are not many organizations in this area that are working on or already have this. I do like the idea of being a leader in this area, but at the same time, we are not in any hurry to really get it done.....