Smartphones and tablets are here to stay, which is exactly why your recruiting strategy needs to incorporate mobile technology. With 46% of all Americans using smartphones and 31% of American Internet users owning tablets, it’s time to kick your mobile recruiting strategy into high gear! Adding mobile strategy to your recruitment will not only improve the candidate experience, but also give you a wider skill set as a recruiter.
Give the three main ways to reach candidates through mobile recruiting–emails, social networks and websites–your process of recruiting candidates would be wise to excel in each of these areas. Here’s how to do it:
Emails
More than a quarter of all emails are opened on mobile devices, which includes both tablets and smartphones. This means the way you send emails and the content you include needs to be optimized for mobile users. By sending the most important information in your recruiting strategy in emails optimized for mobile, you’ll drastically improve the candidate experience.
First, writing a compelling subject line and preheader text for your email. The preheader text is the smaller “teaser” to the email; if the candidate isn’t immediately pulled in by the subject line, your teaser could pull them in.
Then, assure that your email content can be read on mobile devices. Flashy images or text that will take longer to load on a phone could be tedious and work against you. Focus on the content of what you’re writing to assure that it can be read by the widest audience and gets your point across. If you ask candidates to click away from the email to a separate webpage, make sure those landing pages are also optimized for mobile devices. Which brings me to my next point…
Websites
Whether you’re directing candidates to your website or hoping they navigate there independently, you want your content to be easy to read on both a small smartphone or larger tablet. When deciding what content to put your mobile site–whether it’s your careers page or a separate landing page–remember that people are using these devices on the go. Candidates’ attention spans may be a lot shorter, so your message needs to be much snappier!
Don’t waste time with long, superfluous text. Make your point and be done. Use humor, quick anecdotes or interesting statistics to grab candidates attention. When they pack their phone back into their pocket or bag you want them to remember what your website said. Ideally, you want them to remember enough so they’ll come back later and learn more.
Social Networks
Finally, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are the perfect ways to enliven your job candidate search. Not only does it give you a medium to update interested candidates on job openings and the recruiting process, but it also improves the candidate experience because it meets them on a familiar turf. Candidates easily turn to social media on their smartphones or tablets, so you can inject your mobile recruiting strategy into their conversation with ease. Of course, you’ll never want to be obnoxious or overly chatty, so make a name for yourself as a trustworthy recruiter.
Get out there and start making mobile recruiting part of your recruiting strategy! One easy way to get started is to slap a QR code pointing to your website or social networks to get the conversation started.
Have you tried mobile recruiting? What do you find is the most useful outlet for this type of recruiting? Tell us in the comments below!
