Keeping Your Mobile Recruitment Strategy Flexible

Toby Conibear, European Business Development Director, discusses how recruitment companies need to remain flexible when facing the 24×7 demands of the industry.

The recruitment industry is rapidly becoming mobile enabled but what does that mean? From changing the candidate experience to improving client relationships and transforming the productivity of consultants, agencies now have a number of ways of utilising mobile technologies.

Providing candidates and clients with mobile access to the recruiter’s website is one thing – and an increasingly important thing – but that’s just the start. A mobile recruitment strategy needs to encompass both candidates applying for jobs out of hours and recruitment consultants responding to job vacancies. With mobile and flexible working increasingly dominating the industry can any recruitment agency really afford to wait until 9am on a Monday morning?

Today, smartphone penetration has reached 67% according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and tablet penetration has reached 22%; while a new generation is now entering the workforce that has only ever interacted online.  This is changing the way people work and with the recent Flexible Working Regulations, amended on 30^th June 2014 to cover all employees after 26 weeks’ service, mobile technologies are essential to support the changing working environment.

Despite the slow adoption of mobile within the recruitment sector and the lack of strong mobile recruitment strategies in the market, ComScore estimates that between 20% and 30% of all recruitment pages are currently viewed via mobile devices. Furthermore, any firm not offering a mobile enabled version of its website could see a demotion in mobile rankings on search engines such as Google.

What are the key components of a successful mobile strategy?  Firms need to consider the best ways to provide candidates and clients with mobile access.  Whether via a mobile website or app, understanding the best solution for you and your candidates is of utmost importance because enabling effective interaction via mobile devices is now a necessity.