As of May of this year, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions were near 7 billion or about 95.5% of global population. In the US, mobile subscriptions have topped 345.2 million with an overall population of 313.9 million, or a saturation rate of 110% (source). Smartphones now account for 65.2% of all mobile subscriptions in the US (source). Meanwhile, Simply Hired conducted a survey in 2013 that revealed as many as 86% of smartphone owners would use them in searching and applying for jobs. These statistics mean that your company can’t afford not to go mobile with its recruitment efforts. Rest assured that your competitors are already doing this or getting ready to, which means you’ve got to get onboard quickly or lose talent to them. Here’s what you can do to get started:

Optimize your career site. You have to bite the bullet and make sure your career website is mobile-ready. There’s no way around it. Yes, it will take time, effort and resources, but if you want to leverage mobile to your recruitment advantage, this is your first must-do basic starting point.

Determine what aspects can go mobile. Most companies haven’t cracked the nut of actually figuring out how candidates can apply for a job via a mobile device. There are a host of challenges and limitations in making it happen. If your company can figure it out, then you’ll be way ahead of the curve. Still, there are plenty of other items to focus on if you want to go mobile with your career site and recruitment efforts. One author lists out the following focal points (source):

• The ability to sign up for job alerts in specific areas.
• The ability to join a community and interact with other candidates and company employees.
• Access to publicly available information about the company (including both negative and positive reviews).
• Insight into corporate culture.
• The ability to participate in screening (documents, references, tests).
• The ability to get a status update on an application.
• The ability to schedule, cancel and reschedule appointments.
• Legally defensible integration with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Develop an analytics platform. If you’re going to bother going mobile, be sure you build in a robust analytics platform that allows you to capture the data you need to evaluate your mobile recruitment strategies as well as roll that data into your other traditional recruitment efforts.

Connect with target demographics. This is where the rubber hits the road in terms of mobile recruitment strategies. Building upon some of the features listed above, here are some additional leverage points for your mobile recruitment strategies:

• Engaging, interactive content that is mobile-ready. Take the point listed above about insight into corporate culture. One way to do this might be a series of videos that can be watched on mobile devices, each one ending with a particular link to a related area of the company website that give more information. This is especially important if you need to “sell” prospective employees on your company’s location (say, if it’s rural). They also give you a chance to show job requirements in real life as they actually happen. This has the additional benefit of helping potential candidates not apply if they can clearly see they are not suited for the job.
• Make the most of instant communication. Part of the beauty of the mobile revolution is instant communication via email, texting and instant messaging. You’ve got the capability for all of these, now apply them to the recruitment process to keep candidates engaged and interested as they see how responsive you are in the mobile environment. Just make sure you offer a clear opt-in and/or opt-out for those who want some choice about receiving text messages.
• Mobile Video Conferencing. Combining the above two suggestions, you can also consider conducting interviews via mobile video conferencing. This would be a great opportunity to build upon the growing success of something like Google Hangouts. This can be a great way to interact live with a candidate to get an initial sense of fit without going all the way to a formal on-site interview.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s possible when you start taking your recruitment efforts mobile. Keep an eye out for future articles that get into the nitty gritty of what you’re likely to face when you make this happen at your company.

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