Job candidates are using mobile. Are you? It’s not as basic a question as it seems. Mobile capable and mobile optimized are very different animals. The former is the least that recruiters can offer to candidates. The latter makes searching and applying for jobs with a mobile device as easy as it can be.
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A healthy percentage of candidates and active job seekers use mobile devices all day, every day. They use it for ordering a pizza, checking email, setting an alarm before sleep and, yes, looking for a job. Go the extra mile for this growing percentage of people, and you’ll be ahead of the recruiting game.
Half of Your Candidates Use Mobile
Active job seekers use a mobile device over 40 times a day, from waking until going to sleep at night. That’s not to say that they look for a job 40 times every day. They use the device for everything else, including social media, making purchases, listening to music and using GPS. That’s a lot of attention devoted to one piece of electronics.
The user experience at many of those destinations is crafted to make it easy and interactive. Retailers can’t afford to lose a sale because their site isn’t mobile optimized. It’s too easy for the buyer to opt out. And neither can recruiters afford to lose that stellar candidate who hits a snag partway between finding the perfect job and submitting the application. In that case, opting out means you may never find that applicant again.
Mobile Optimized Recruitment Removes Barriers
Even some of the most popular job sites are waning in appeal because they don’t offer the one thing that job seekers want and need. They’re viewable using a mobile device, and some of them take users to an off-site page. But how far can a potential applicant really get in the application process? That’s perhaps the largest problem with mobile right now. Recruiters with a “checkpoint met” mindset about mobile capability are missing out, and so are their job applicants.
Instead of an afterthought to meet a need for some job seekers, mobile optimization should be the leading edge of your recruitment strategy. That’s because the people who are used to an optimized experience everywhere else don’t have a lot of patience for a job-seeking experience that falls short. And that number grows consistently.
How and Why Job Seekers Use Mobile
Nearly 30 percent of people who are actively looking for a job have certain expectations about the process. Because mobile optimization is so common elsewhere, and because it’s such an integral part of everyday life, they anticipate the ability to find and apply for a job using mobile. The majority of them will abandon the application altogether if the experience isn’t user-friendly. That’s 65 percent of the mobile audience.
What’s really interesting is the volume of potential candidates that recruiters could reach, but don’t without a real mobile strategy. Thirty-two percent of passive job seekers, people who are already employed someplace else, use mobile just before sleep and upon waking. And 21 percent check their mobile device while at work. With the job market favoring prospective employees, it pays to focus on what they want. And what they want is a friendly mobile job application experience.
Having some mobile strategy is a step in the right direction. But in 2016, it’s not enough to imagine that mobile is one small part of a much larger strategy.
The people you want to hire are out there right now using a mobile device. They’re shopping for concert tickets, booking vacations, checking the weather and navigating through unfamiliar neighborhoods. They could be applying for a job with your company. Would you help them navigate that too? Chances are, they’d appreciate it.