Getting a Mobile Enabled Recruitment Experience

Toby Conibear, European Business Development Director, discusses streamlining the recruitment experience, working out best practice for your agency and keeping consultants mobile.

Mobile provides the chance to create a far more automated and streamlined recruitment experience, particularly with temporary staff. Benefits include automatic confirmation of job information to both candidates and employers, and automated submission of timesheets. These streamlined processes free up consultants to undertake the value added roles of client and candidate acquisition.

Providing a mobile enabled recruitment experience for clients and candidates is just the beginning of a transformation in recruitment practices. With web-based data, most agencies are working with very similar sets of candidates; competitive success is all about getting the candidate in front of the client first. 

In this market timing is now critical, and consultancies need to take a hard look at processes and working practices to exploit mobile technologies and enable rapid responses to new business opportunities.

Recruitment CRM applications already offer mobile diary management, contact management and the ability to process data through the relevant workflows. The next generation of CRM will work on smart devices and will increasingly improve usability by using intelligent ways of representing data on a small screen. Moving forwards, mobile CRM will increasingly dominate consultancy activities.

Real time access to all CRM data anytime, anywhere via mobile provides significant opportunities to transform client interactions – from using a client company hyperlink to get a map and directions, to enabling a full candidate database via mobile when in client meetings.

That said, the adoption of mobile technology raises a number of questions, from the introduction of new working hours to the challenges of managing and incentivising staff that will often be working remotely.  It is certainly essential for a mobile environment to provide a strong audit trail to ensure consultancies have the same level of control, and visibility, of consultant activity. This continuous evolution means consultancies will need to constantly review their recruiters’ work/life balance to maximise performance.

In the saturated UK market, first mover advantage is key and for entrepreneurial recruitment agencies, going mobile can be the next step in their business evolution. Being able to meet client demands within hours can help agencies compete where there are several pitching for the same role.