What is mobile-friendly – and why should you care?
What if you had a service – say, a job board/candidate acquisition/employer service – and no one knew about it because it wasn’t mobile-friendly? How long do you think you’d stay in business?
Countless job boards (and other web-based businesses) disappeared during the past decade because they failed to gain visibility with their prospective clients. In other words, their customers didn’t know they were there.
Guess what? It’s happening all over again – except it’s on a new platform: mobile. (Check out this neat infographic on mobile recruiting trends).
Somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of job seekers are already looking for work from their mobile device. Given the fact that almost everyone has a mobile device and a majority have smartphones and tablets that tie directly into the web, it’s inevitable that we’ll see more – not less – job seekers searching via mobile.
So…is your job board/candidate acquisition/employer service mobile-friendly? Let’s see:
- Does it autodetect the device accessing it, and format accordingly – without requiring the user to do anything? (Bonus points: is your site built as a responsive web design?)
- Is the key functionality available via a mobile device (i.e., job search, setting up an account, job alerts, etc.)?
- Is it easy to navigate?
If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions, then your service is indeed mobile-friendly. It really is that simple!
If you answered ‘no’ to any question, you’ve still got time to change. But the clock is ticking – each day thousands of users migrate further away from the traditional desktop or laptop platform. If you’re not easily accessible on a mobile platform, you simply don’t exist for these users. So you have to ask yourself – can your service afford to be invisible?
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Jeff, Thanks for the mentions!
As always, great stuff from your blog!
I believe that the first (and possibly most important) step for recruiters is to engage with mobile web site campaigns which are coupled with their targeted social recruiting efforts.
This approach will deliver return, provide learning and it won’t break the bank. It is feasible for a firm to experiment with different approaches to mobile apply based on campaigns. These experiments should include changes to back office processing and the volume of data points collected by a company!
This could be a new opportunity for job boards.
Great list! Another important element is the relationship of the mobile site to different sections of the main site. I have seen way too many companies with a great mobile home page that sends you to a non-mobile-optimized careers page. Going mobile may need to happen in steps, but sending someone from a nice mobile page to a desktop page is always a bummer–do what you can to avoid it!