By Nathalie Carstens, CHRP

As 56 per cent of Canadians now own a smartphone, career sites must be mobile friendly and allow applicants to easily apply.

For organizations, finding and attracting qualified candidates is the starting point of recruiting top talent. We spend time and energy creating the best job ads that are eye-catching, accurate and search engine optimized so all prospective candidates can find it. We post advertisements on our career sites and job boards in hopes candidates will be looking for them. However, after all of this effort, we may be turning off 50 per cent of prospective job seekers.

Indeed.com conducted a study among job seekers and found that 25 per cent of applicants start their job search on mobile devices and then go to a desktop computer to complete their applications. Another 25 per cent only use mobile devices in their job search.

On our website, we have more than ten thousand job seekers vising every month. We looked at our Google stats for mobile recruitment and found that on our website:

• mobile users submitted resumes at a rate of 16 per cent compared to desktop users.
• mobile and tablet users account for 33 per cent of our career page traffic.

It quickly became apparent that we had not tailored our website for mobile candidates. It was mind blowing to think that after all our marketing efforts, we were turning away thousands of candidates due to the way we had set up our mobile webpages.

We made some changes, setting up an easy way for mobile users to quickly forward their resumes or LinkedIn profiles to us. We shortened some of our ads in order to make them easy to read on a small screen and added an “apply from your mobile” button at the top and bottom of our job ads.

The immediate results have been overwhelming! The first month, after adding these features, we increased our mobile resume submissions by 300 per cent.

In recruitment, it’s important to keep up with the trends and changes in technology, especially in markets that are extremely competitive with skills shortages. It’s important to continuously audit your processes and view the recruitment process from the eyes of your applicants, especially the valuable ones who may be choosing not to apply because a career site is not optimized for the thing they use the most — their smartphone.

Here are three free ways to ensure you keep on top of mobile recruiting:

1. Have Google Analytics installed on your career site and set up goals to measure how many mobile users are applying for your jobs.
2. Borrow an iPhone, iPad, Samsung and Blackberry and check out how your job postings look on your career site. If improvements need to be made, take a screen shot and send them to the people that design your website or the makers of your applicant tracking system.
3. Reduce the size of your job ads to remove information that qualified candidates would already know and then review your Google Analytics results every quarter.

We have been utilizing text messaging (SMS) from our applicant tracking system for the last few years and are still evaluating how it drives mobile traffic. Text messaging is quickly becoming the preferred method of communication for some people so human resources professionals will have to continue to track this trend and prepare for how those outside and inside our organizations use it in their career search.

Nathalie Carstens, CHRP holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Winnipeg with Majors in Conflict Resolution and Sociology. Nathalie brings to Red Seal Recruiting prior recruitment expertise in the field of Mining Exploration. Born and raised in Manitoba, she has a depth of knowledge about central Canada. Nathalie enjoys working with candidates and clients in order to find them the perfect fit. In her free time Nathalie enjoys cycling, running, and exploring in the outdoors.