Even if you live under a rock, in the middle of a dense forest, surrounded by a desert wasteland, you still know that recruiting is now a mobile game.

The average person will spend over four hours on their devices each day. If you assume the recommended eight hours of sleep, this means that 25 percent of a peron’s waking day is spent on a mobile device. The majority of this time is eaten up by browsing social media (over two hours, according to Statista) and firing off an endless stream of texts (almost a half hour each day).

That said, people do use their mobile devices for more practical tasks as well, including searching for jobs. A 2014 study performed by Censuswide, and funded by Indeed.com, found that 65 percent of people were using mobile devices while looking for new jobs. This number grew as high as 77 percent in younger age brackets.

This is a staggering majority that cannot be overlooked by recruiters. Mobile recruiting, while still a relatively new trend, is a vital branch that needs to be incorporated into any company’s hiring strategy.

Unfortunately, the infancy of this trend means that recruiters are still forming their understanding of the best practices when approaching mobile users with career opportunities. To help facilitate that learning, here are three mistakes that organizations need to avoid when approaching mobile recruitment.

Check out SmartRecruiters mobile recruiting here!

1. Failing To Adapt Job Posts To The Mobile Environment

Convenience is one of the most common reasons cited for job seekers turning to mobile. The same Censuswide, Indeed.com survey found that convenience was the number one motivator for mobile job searchers. That convenience is severely damaged when recruiters fail to adapt their job posts to the mobile environment. With smaller screens and touch navigation, mobile users have vastly different browsing behaviors from desktop applicants.

Your mobile recruitment posts need to provide the necessary information to entice applicants and ensure that they understand the position, its duties, and the requirements. But, too much information is overwhelming for mobile users that are staring at a much smaller screen. Not to mention, these individuals have notoriously short attention spans.

UPS has been a leader in online recruiting for nearly two decades. Realizing that browsing social media and watching videos are two of the most common mobile activities, they made sure to target Facebook and Twitter users with job posts and incorporate videos, instead of large blocks of text, in their job descriptions. This allowed them to reduce hiring costs from $600-700 to just $60-70.

2. Lacking A Mobile Career Portal

Alongside their social media and video-enabled mobile recruitment, UPS also leverages a mobile app designed to be a communication channel between the company and applicants. Both sides find value from this addition to mobile recruiting. Applicants can ask questions and receive additional information vital to their hiring.

UPS, on the other hand, can use these initial conversations to more accurately target the right employees for interviews. This has had a dramatic impact on improving their interview-hire ratio to 2:1.

In short, offering some mobile career portal, or app, that enhances your mobile recruitment is a huge advantage. This is especially true with younger applicants in the millennial generation because these job seekers are so mobile-centric.

3. Forgetting to Track Results

Data has become an invaluable and unavoidable tool in today’s always-connected world. We’re producing data at absolutely wonky rates. In one report from 2017, there was a total of 2.7 Zettabytes of data in the “digital universe.” Translated into gigabytes, let’s say it is a lot of zeroes, with more being added every second.

If you ask your marketing department how much they use data to inform decisions, they’ll likely talk your ear off. So, why not incorporate data into your mobile recruitment strategies? If you aren’t continually testing your job postings, in terms of message and channel, then how will you determine what’s working? Mobile users search differently, which means they may be using different keywords than expected to find job posts.

Google’s People Analytics team (a Google-ized name for their HR department) used data from their past interviews to determine what questions and practices in their hiring process yielded high-performing employees. They found that specific tactics, which they long presumed were effective, actually added no value to the equation. Thus, they removed them from their hiring tactics.

So…

These mistakes can be crippling to mobile recruiting, but they are very avoidable. By spending more time analyzing your mobile recruitment efforts and creating hiring experiences that are designed for the mobile user, you’ll see more, qualified applicants entering your onboarding process.

5. Rally House gets the holiday hiring spirit with this job ad! We all know there’s a significant spike in the labor market during the holidays to fill seasonal positions. Also, Pinterest is more heavily trafficked during the holidays for crafters and cooks alike looking for fun holiday projects. Rally House is a sports goods store, and while they may not be looking for crafters specifically, they’re expanding their talent pool.

Follow SmartRecruiters on Pinterest.

This week we introduce Mobile Career Sites for all customers. With 50% of internet traffic soon coming from mobile devices, it’s rather important to give people an easy access to jobs from a tiny mobile screen.

 
How does it work?
 
Your default SmartRecruiters Careers Page: www.smartrecruiters.com/companyname now has a mobile style sheet so that when someone accesses it via a mobile device it automatically adjusts itself to display your job list and individual job descriptions in a nice and easy format.
 

 
To see your new Mobile Career site in action, pull your iphone, android or any phone and go to www.smartrecruiters.com/yourcompany. You can also check out other examples such as www.smartrecruiters.com/photobucket or www.smartrecruiters.com/gooddata.
 
How can I leverage it?
 
If you already use your SmartRecruiters page as a Career Website and have it linked from your own website, then you have nothing else to do. It will work automatically. If your company has a mobile website, then make sure to use www.smartrecruiters.com/companyname as your link to Mobile Careers
 
Other Topics

 
• Apply with LinkedIn: We fixed some issues with confusing language in the LinkedIn functionality

 
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It’s often surprising for job seekers to learn that even with a very candidate heavy market, that recruiters and organizations are struggling to find talent. So while more than 14 million are currently unemployed and eager to begin work, finding the right fit candidate for a position remains challenge even in this economy. In fact, 15% of companies in North America and Asia believe they have enough qualified candidates to fill their key positions.

And so as recruiters, we balance our need to find quality talent with the time and cost associated with filling our open positions. Even with all this talk as of recent regarding Facebook, social recruitment and talent oceans, the recruiting balance is still heavily weighted towards your old recruiting friend, the job board. Remember, depending on the job market for your position and location, the top job boards are not the same.

Job boards offer an opportunity to reach a large candidate pool (outside of your network and your networks’ network) through one of the following methods:

• Job Board Ads. Similar in nature to our even older friend the newspaper ad, job board ads serve as an easier way to reach your audience online through your job board of choice’s network, community, and search engine optimization. Make sure to write the job ad to entice the appropriate audience. Many of the larger job boards like Monster.com,CareerBuilder, and even niche boards like SalesGravy own thousands upon thousands of different job board sites offering you a variety of communities in which to post but for a price.

• Job Aggregators. Job Aggregators, such as Indeed and Simply Hired, are search engines for job postings. They consolidate job postings from many sources. There are free job aggregators. These get the ball rolling and start the candidate influx, but they may not bring in enough candidates to complete your search. There are also paid models, such as pay-per-click models and sponsored models to move them postings higher up within the listings by category.

• Forum Frenzy. Many job boards, such as SalesGravy and Brazen Careerist, offer forums as part of their candidate services and resources where job seekers pose questions and solicit feedback from other job seekers. Consider leveraging these forums by providing value to your potential candidate base, asking questions, and connecting with them offline as a potential candidate sourcing pool.  Like any forum or community, the key is to provide value, develop relationships, and take those online conversations offline.

• The Email Blast. I’ve worked with various job boards over the years that have used effective marketing campaigns to drive candidates to our job board advertisements through targeted banner ads, more frequent posting, and targeted email alerts. But most job seekers will tell you that these methods don’t always work. We’ve been emailed to death. As a recruiter, I always keep a recent resume on file with my job board(s) of choice. It’s important to experience the job seeker experience through the eyes of the candidate. The trusty email blast is no different and with relatively small open rate you may be reaching desperate instead of quality candidates.

• Tapping Into the Resume Database. Leveraging the job board’s resume database can be a solid candidate recruitment strategy. Candidates who have recently updated their candidate profiles are seen first in your resume search. These active candidates provide their resume for you to see. The downside is that a generic resume posted for multiple positions, doesn’t always ensure a quality candidate match let alone the passive candidates who are just surfing the ads instead of posting their profile. Plus, the available resumes are probably not as up to date as LinkedIn profiles. It’s also a likely bet that your direct competition has the same or similar access to this candidate pool, which is where creative keyword and qualifications search comes in handy. For example, Try searching for non-profit fundraiser instead of outside sales professional; mainly, search more creatively than your competition.

Job boards are this past decade’s most valuable tool of your overall recruitment strategy, and yet they still remain the most effective. The key when developing a recruiting strategy with job boards is to keep your hiring measurements in mind, such as your cost per hire and turnover by source in check, and remember to find a balance between sourcing more creatively than your competition and turning to the job boards that have historically worked.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a HR consultant, new media strategist, and author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. Jessica is the host of Job Search Secrets, an internet television show for job seekers.

Photo Credit HrFishbowl

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