As smartphone adoption rates multiply and social networking behaviors increase, the mobile recruitment industry will steadily expand over the next few years. According to a Nielson report published in late 2011, 44% of Americans own a smartphone, up from just 18% two years ago. Although a Vision Mobile study reported that gaming is the top category access by 62% of all U.S. smartphones, Nielson’s “Social Media Report – Q3” states mobile social media use is also on the rise with nearly 2 of 5 users accessing applications from their mobiles.

Mashable’s “Mobile recruiting is on the rise – Study” reveals that employers do not have a congruent Social Business strategy on how to take advantage of the mobile web to find and hire top talent because of their lack of knowledge of how job seekers are using mobile devices. Clearly, the increasing number of smartphone users among potential candidates will be the main driver for the mobile recruiting trend, raising the demand for mobile recruitment applications.

In our endeavor to recommend the best mobile recruitment apps to hiring companies, we started with looking at today’s most popular apps; and we came up with some interesting findings. Most surprisingly, some apps are accountable for different stages of the search and recruitment process instead of the entire lifecycle of the process.
Mobile apps recommended to companies that are looking to:

• Employ their brand – Applications such as OTYS, PepsiCo (Corporate), and Personato are recommended to companies that want to be white-labeled before their target audience.
• Post jobs on boards – Monster, CareerBuilder, and Indeed are in the top 10 of the most popular business apps, according to App Annie. All apps are comprehensive search engines for jobs, providing several advanced search options including job title, salary range, specific companies, full-time, part-time, or contract-based, and whether the posting came from a company or a recruiter.
• Share virtual business cards – Cardcloud, Bump, including Twitter and LinkedIn integration, are business tools which allow a recruiter to exchange contacts and to find more background information about a candidate. With BeamMe, recruiters can send virtual business cards (Vcard) sent to devices via SMS and email. The price:  FREE!
• Network through social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter don’t need an introduction. These leaders are well aware of the matchmaking abilities they harbor and are spending millions of dollars developing recruiting services to offer for additional fees.Without additional cost, recruiters can take great advantage throughout the recruitment process announcing jobs and easily searching for candidates to establish and maintain contacts irrespective of each other’s location.
• Enjoy Augmented Reality – Although it is thought to be expensive, find out how to register with Layar to be part of Career Builder, which has a content layer that allows people to search for jobs all around them.
• Schedule and hold interviews without hassle – Candidates, recruiters and companies alike can now schedule an interview with Tungle, whose appsharescalendar availability with anyone to prevent double bookings and going back and forth to find a time to meet. Furthermore, companies can use video interviewing to save time and cost through Skype’s mobile app.

Efficiently manage business processes – Companies can now implement mobile integrated systems to easily manage timesheets, expenses and other administrative tasks with Timesheasy, a web based timesheet solution specifically built for the staffing and recruiting industry. ADP Mobile applications are also an option for taking thing further and connect all employees with the company right from their phones from payroll and timesheets to news events and company contacts.

These mobile applications are among the best at increasing the efficiency of connecting the right people at the right time. Relational IT acknowledges and embraces mobile recruitment’s vital role and recommends that all hiring organizations incorporate these tools into their Social Business strategy.

As the endless development of new mobile applications add value throughout the whole recruitment and hiring process, we will continue to watch for enhanced interoperability between the existing and new mobile apps to manage mobile recruitment.

Relational IT’s staffing professionals are embracing mobile tools in their daily activity and proactively advocate the use of mobile recruitment by companies, candidates as well as our employees.