If you work in Human Resources chances are you have heard the Silo analogy once or twice. Ok maybe more times than you care to remember. But the silo issue is not exclusively an HR issue.  All business functions are potential silos.  Departments are set up so that we can apply concentrated resources and skills to specific types of work in order to scale efficiently.  But we run into trouble when the work overlaps two departments and we end up with disconnects and duplication of effort.  One of the biggest disconnects I have seen lately is between HR and Marketing.

Ever since the late nineties when career sites became part of the overall corporate web presence and the emergence of employer branding the HR and Marketing departments had to start working together. But the speed of the mobile technology trend has put a spot light on a glaring example of how far we still have to go.

In the Corporate Mobile Readiness Report we evaluated the Fortune 500 on six criteria related to how they are addressing the rapidly increasing volume of web traffic coming from mobile devices.  Here are a few statistics that tell the story:

• There were 141 companies with mobile corporate websites.
• Only 23 of them had links to a careers page.
• Only 6 of the 23 links led to a mobile optimized career site (which means 17 links went off a cliff).
• Yet there were 65 companies with mobile optimized career sites.

This means that Marketing departments are developing mobile sites for the business without even a thought of the HR department, and HR is out setting up mobile career sites with no involvement from Marketing.

At the mRecruiting conference back in September during one of the panel discussions we were asked what we thought about this disconnect. One of the HR Practitioners on the panel said “If we waited for corporate marketing, we would not have a mobile career site for a few more years.”  I am sure there are some marketing folks out there who might say the same about HR.

Maybe it’s the speed of the mobile trend that has us off guard, maybe it’s the silos. But either way, it is clear that most companies are way behind and there is a big opportunity for improvement.

http://blog.imomentous.com/trends-mobile-recruiting-the-silos/