As mobile usage continues to increase, employers and recruiters continue to lag in developing good mobile recruiting strategies. If you haven’t heard this message before, you MUST make it easy for job seekers to interact with your recruiting firm via their mobile device. You must. If you aren’t sure what this means, take out your mobile device right now, and look at your company’s website on it. If you can’t effectively use it on your mobile device without pinching, stretching, scrolling, or typing excessively, you do NOT have a mobile-friendly site. If it is hard (or impossible) for job seekers to visit your site, apply for a job, or share your content from their mobile device, they will stop coming back. If I sound a little bit alarmist, good.
Mobile recruiting has the potential to change your business almost as radically as the internet did. Job seekers are less and less likely to spend time looking for jobs on a desktop computer at home. They’re surfing on the commute to work, in line at Starbucks, and on the sidelines of their kids’ school activities. And it involves a completely new way of looking at your recruiting firm’s website.
One of the primary debates surrounding mobile recruiting strategy is deciding whether to build a mobile app or a mobile website. Here’s a quick tutorial on the different options:
- Mobile app. An app, or application, is basically a piece of software that is downloaded and installed on a user’s device. Some apps can operate without an internet connection. Apps are device-driven, so separate versions must be created for Apple devices, Android devices, Windows devices, etc. This can drive up the cost considerably.
- Mobile website. A mobile website consists of browser-based HTML pages that are accessed via the internet. Many companies build a mobile website that is completely separate from their “regular” website, including a different URL such as http://m.companyname.com or http://www.companyname.mobi. Mobile websites may be hosted separately and often do not contain all of the features and information of the “full” website.
- Responsively-designed website. A responsively-designed website is a website that is programmed to “respond” to the user’s device and automatically resize the page to the correct size and orientation. A responsively-designed website can save time and money in development and maintenance, since there is only ONE website to change and update.
Each of these options has pros and cons, so you need to think about what your goals are before making a decision. For example, it’s really trendy to have an app, and there is a lot of chatter around mobile recruiting apps, BUT it’s not guaranteed that job seekers will download and install an app, especially if (a) they have to pay for it, and (b) they have a “one-off” need to visit your website.
If you decide that a mobile app is critical to your mobile recruiting strategy, you’d still be smart to make sure your primary website is mobile-friendly because if an app links a user to a poorly-designed site, it defeats the purpose of having a cool app. For most recruiting firms, my opinion is that a responsively-designed website is the best choice – it will include most devices, give you the most SEO benefit, and make it easier for you to maintain your site. For more information about the differences between these options, check out:
Image courtesy of suphakit73 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Ummm, hands down a mobile website! Not just any mobile website either. You want to go with an adaptive mobile website. A company that builds these is WompMobile, check them out: http://www.wompmobile.com