Recruiters have been slow to adopt mobile recruitment and are in danger of losing candidates and damaging their reputation according to Mike Taylor from Web Based Recruitment.
“There seems to be a general lack of awareness that it is becoming essential to have some form of mobile strategy. More and more job seekers are expecting to be able to search and apply for jobs on their mobile phone in the same way as they would expect to be able to do their shopping and banking using their mobile phone” said Taylor.
Retailers v Recruitment
But whereas a lot of retailers and banks now offer mobile-friendly websites and mobile apps to help their customers (because they know if they don’t offer easy mobile access they will lose customers) the same can’t be said of Recruitment.
“Every time an email job alert goes out from a company there is a high probability of that email being read by a job seeker on their mobile phone. And if a job seeker clicks on a link in the email they will be taken to a website which (in the majority of cases) hasn’t been mobile-enabled. This can lead to frustrating user experience for the job seeker and can suggest to them that Recruiters don’t care about the experience they are offering via a mobile phone” continued Taylor.
Mobile Web Experience
A bi-annual survey released by Compuware in 2011 entitled “What Users Want From Mobile” showed that the majority of mobile web users are only willing to retry a mobile website (78%) or mobile application (80%) twice or less if it doesn’t work the first time. In addition, a third of them will go to a competitor site instead.
Some other key findings included:
- A bad experience on a mobile website leaves mobile web users much less likely to return to, or recommend, a particular website.
- 71% of global mobile web users expect websites to load at least as quickly or faster on their mobile phone compared to the computer they use at home.
- Nearly 60% of web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74% are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.
Time For Recruitment To Change
“In today’s mobile world every business should be making it easy for people to visit their website, whether through a mobile phone or mobile device. If a website is down and can’t be accessed through a traditional desktop pc or laptop then swift action is required to get the website up and running again. Unfortunately for some mobile web users they are seeing the equivalent of a website being “permanently down” as they are unable to view it on their phone.
