The job search process has rapidly evolved in recent years to meet the demands of today’s tech-savvy job applicants. Gone are the days of paper applications and, in some cases, applications via desktop computers are also declining. This is because mobile is becoming central to job searching – especially among millennials. In fact, recent data found that over 90 percent of job applicants use their mobile devices at some point in the process when searching for their dream jobs.
If your team doesn’t offer a mobile-friendly experience for job applicants, you’ll likely lose top talent to employers who have a strong mobile strategy in place. Below, we’ve outlined several tips for you to ensure your hiring process doesn’t drive tech-savvy job applicants away.
Maintain a Mobile-Friendly Career Site
Given the record-low unemployment rate and abundance of opportunities available at job seekers’ fingertips, you’ll only have their attention for a short period of time before they continue looking at other open roles. Because of this, you have to need a mobile-friendly career site that is easy for prospective job applicants to quickly scan from their phones.
Best practices for mobile-friendly career site content include: short paragraphs, short sentences, a good amount of white space, engaging images and short videos. All of these components will make it easier for job seekers to scan your page on their smaller, mobile screens before applying.
In addition to making your career site mobile-friendly, it’s important to sell all prospective applicants – both those applying via mobile and others – on the opportunity joining your team presents. Your career site should include compelling content that highlights your company overview, mission, core values, benefits, career growth opportunities, employee testimonials and success stories, open roles, and more. By including all this information, you can get top job seekers across devices excited about joining your team.
Offer an Option to Apply Via Mobile
Up to 1 in 4 job seekers apply to open roles via mobile devices. If you don’t have an option to apply via mobile, prospective job applicants might forget about your open role and move on to another opportunity by the time they reach a desktop computer – causing you to miss out on quality talent.
To ensure you’re not driving away applicants looking to apply via mobile, make sure your job applications are mobile-enabled – and don’t require too many steps to apply, so it’s easy to do on the go. Not only is typing a ton of information into a job application time consuming on mobile, but applicants also might not have their resume files saved on their mobile devices.
Rather than having candidates type every detail from their resumes or upload their resumes via mobile, offer an option for candidates to simply include a links to their LinkedIn profiles and/or portfolios. Other than this link, you can simply require basic contact information to complete the application. If your application gets much longer, prospective applicants might drop out of the application process. Anything you can do to make the application process easier on candidates will help you secure more job applicants in today’s competitive hiring market.
Communicate with Applicants Via Text Messaging
Your job applicants receive countless emails on a daily basis, posing a risk for your candidate communication to get overlooked. Ultimately, this can lead to a lack of engagement between hiring managers and candidates. When a candidate overlooks an email, it can lead to missed interviews or increased time to complete certain hiring steps – such as failing to initiate the background check process when prompted via email. And if a hiring manager misses an email about scheduling an interview or changing the interview time, it can cause the candidate to get frustrated and look elsewhere for his or her next opportunity.
Rather than risk candidate communication getting lost in a cluttered email inbox, text messaging can increase engagement and ensure candidates see all critical communication throughout the hiring process. In fact, nearly 90 percent of people agree it would be beneficial to receive text messages during the hiring process. Text messaging means candidates will almost immediately see interview reminders, schedule changes and other important information.
Text messaging is an impactful communication channel for both employers and job seekers and can streamline your candidate and new hire communication, keeping candidates engaged. As an added bonus, hiring managers who have used Hireology’s text messaging solution have decreased time to hire by 8 days, ultimately increasing productivity that’s typically lost when roles are open.
Maintaining a mobile-friendly experience for job applicants is key to standing out from the competition and securing top talent. For additional tips on attracting quality candidates in today’s competitive hiring market, read our resource, “The Hireology Employment Brand Playbook.”
