Friday, June 1, 2012

Creating Mobile Recruiting Apps = Time Wasted

Recents statistics from a company calling themselves comScore show the mobile Internet audience is using Facebook nearly an hour more a month than they’re using it on a desktop.

With the many apps now on hand (physically) in the mobile world; users have the option to either use the downloaded app version, or the mobile version. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers writing that applications are “winning the battle.” This interpretation is in fact wrong. 

Notice these happy-gents all showcasing their mobile devices with the Facebook logo? Yes, well these five blokes are a tiny bit of the many that probably believe that a mobile app would better produce results for recruiting. On the contrary: your mobile recruiting strategies should have nothing more important than offering your candidates an optimized mobile website, and here’s why.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. are channels. We all “browse” media through these social channels. The people and businesses we follow within social channels curate web content, which we discover and consume. The Twitter and Facebook apps are our preferred window to consume the web; not only do these apps direct us to new content, they fetch it and display it for us in one place.

Frequently we click links on Twitter from our mobile app. The webpage loads in our Twitter app. We do not take the URL and open a web browser and read the content. Social channels are the true “browsers.” We do not have to search or have a pre-conceived idea of what we are looking for. Instead we browse the social channel and when we see something we like, we order up more content by tapping the hyperlink.

Empowered with the knowledge that Twitter and Facebook apps on our mobile are the new browser, and knowing the enormous volume of users and time spent consuming these channels, what do you feel matters when it comes to mobile recruiting optimization? As recruiters wishing to reach a market it is very simple: a mobile-optimized career site/recruitment campaign coupled with social media activity puts your message in front the audience.

Check out the top mobile native apps: Instagram, Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, etc. As a user I expect to return to these apps frequently either for fun or social interaction or new content. Looking for a new job at a single company is not a repeat process. The effort and reward of downloading an app to work at just one company does not add up. The native app will attract downloads from those doing additional research, those really interested in your firm, but these people have probably already applied for a job. Unless your employer brand creates incredible hunger and has millions of people desperate to work for you, an app in AppStore or Android is unlikely to deliver high ROI when it comes to talent attraction.

The mobile site is becoming a must-have for candidate marketing. The mobile application is typically better positioned to assist the selection and onboarding process.
(via: David Martin's article)

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