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- Jo Faragher
With research suggesting three-quarters of jobseekers have access to a smartphone, Jo Faragher looks at why not catering for these candidates could be losing you business.
Your perfect candidate is standing on the platform, waiting for the 8.04am train. Latte in one hand, they’re scrolling through their emails on their smartphone with the other, and eagerly open your daily job alert and see a role that’s just right. But when they click through the link to tell them more, all they can see is a jumble of words in a format too big to fit into the screen in the palm of their hand. Frustrated, they go back to their coffee and look at something else.
According to figures from the job board Jobsite, smartphone usage among job seekers is on the rise, having risen steadily from 43% in February 2010 to 76% in November 2012. And while two or three years ago these candidates might have forgiven an agency or employer for not having a mobile-enabled site, as more of the consumer services they access become mobile-friendly, they expect their job search to be so too.
Mike Taylor, managing director of Web-Based Recruitment, explains: “If your agency doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site, then it puts you at a disadvantage. If someone is looking for a job and they sign up for email alerts, they’ll look at these on their way home from work, click on the link and if what they see is not mobile enabled, they won’t feel good about it. The danger is that [recruiters] don’t realise they’re losing business by not making it easy for people to see the roles.”
Speaking at last year’s Mobile Recruitment Conference, Emma Frazer, head of industry for recruitment at Google UK, explained that one in five recruitment searches on Google now comes via a mobile phone, so agencies not providing candidates with a good experience when they reach their sites could potentially be turning away 20% of their visitors, meaning there is a genuine “opportunity cost” for not being mobile-enabled.
Low awareness
Despite this warning, there is still much to be done in terms of awareness. Last year, Taylor carried out a review of FTSE 100 company websites, which revealed that just 6% of them had mobile-enabled careers sections. He adds: “The problem is it’s not high on companies’ list of priorities, as they’re not aware of the size of the problem. If agencies knew they were losing placement fees and candidates to the agency down the road, it would focus their minds.”
Gareth di Fante, managing director of throughMobile, which specialises in creating mobile sites, agrees. He says: “Generally when we approach potential customers, the response is ‘We’ve already got a website’. But what about the candidates who are looking on their phone during their lunchbreak? These agencies will see the leads they’re generating through web traffic go down because candidates are used to being able to do things on their mobile.”
Mervyn Dinnen, content and community manager at Jobsite, says that the key to ‘going mobile’ is to put yourself in your candidates’ shoes. “Think about where and how [candidates] are accessing information about jobs,” advises Dinnen. “You can’t have level after level of registration and passwords, and because most mobile browsing is done away from home or on the commute, you can’t rely on them having access to wi-fi – their network connection could drop or go altogether. They might save a job to research later, or when they get off the train.” The two peak points in the day, says Dinnen, are at 8am on the morning commute, and 10 o’clock at night, when people are often ‘second-screening’ – browsing the web on an iPad or other tablet while watching TV.
A good place to start is to look at how your candidates tend to find information about the jobs you post online. This can usually be done using Google Analytics, which can tell you what proportion of your audience accesses your site via a particular device or browser.
And while it may be tempting to ask a web developer to come up with a snazzy app that candidates can download, a web-based solution might be the cheaper, and more sensible option. Apps have to be designed for multiple operating environments – your audience could be connecting from iPhones or Android-based devices and then accessing your site again from home on a different device altogether – so ensuring consistency across all of these environments will be tricky. “If you’ve got a budget to spend on your mobile presence, I’d suggest you go for a mobile-friendly site first,” advises di Fante.
A web-based, but mobile-optimised site will be easier to find via Google (and show up in your search rankings), and will be consistent wherever your candidates choose to access it. While actual applications made over mobile devices is on the rise (the number of people applying via a mobile phone was around 550,000 last year, according to Jobsite), most candidates will take basic information or register interest via their mobile phone, and then return to a desktop computer to apply for the role.
Gareth di Fante, throughMobile
Justifying an investment
It can be difficult to justify an investment in optimising your site for mobile browsers, but there are increasingly lower barriers to entry. Many providers in this area charge upfront to build your mobile site, and may then charge on a per-month basis to host and maintain it. REC-accredited throughMobile, for example, offers customers a template mobile recruitment site for an upfront fee of £899, with a monthly fee of £25 thereafter. This includes links to social media and the ability to apply online. Taylor believes there needs to be a change of mindset in how recruiters view an investment in mobile: “It should be part of your operating costs as a business, just like your desktop site. If you’re in a position where your losing candidates to other agencies, it’s an essential, rather than a nice to have,” he says.
Di Fante says that the penny tends to drop when he asks potential clients to try and access their own roles via their personal smartphone. “I ask them to get their phone out and apply for a job via their website. They go quiet for five minutes, but at least they can then see it from their candidates’ point of view.”
In a world where we expect everything to be instant, five minutes can be an eternity – and plenty of time for a candidate to move their interest to another site that is easier to use. By calculating how much you could be losing in commission on those lost leads, surely an investment in going mobile is overdue? “The people you want to get in touch with – three-quarters of them have smartphones and want to use them to hunt for jobs,” says Dinnen. “It shouldn’t be a case of ‘we’ll do it when we get round to it’, there’s an expectation now.”
The next Mobile Recruitment Conference is on the 11th July 2013. Find more information here.
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