How to Deliver a Mobile-First Recruiting Experience Today?

To make sure you’re securing the right talent for your business, you first need to make sure that you’re meeting candidates on their terms. Ensuring that you’re on the right career sites, for example, can help widen your talent pool. Today, delivering a great mobile recruiting experience is just as important. Many of today’s job seekers have grown up and entered the workforce with mobile technology, so engaging them on these platforms is vital.

The Importance of Mobile in the Recruitment Process

Both mobile and tablets are a key part in at least the research stage of any job search for today’s candidates and increasingly they are completing applications on mobile too. That means businesses need to ensure they are delivering a mobile-friendly end-to-end candidate experience beyond basic mobile responsive job listings. Additionally, with mobile playing such a huge part in the lives of many, there are opportunities to further utilise mobile recruiting tools to better engage candidates.

With mobile often used at every stage in the candidate experience, it’s now necessary for businesses to employ a complete mobile-first recruiting approach.  This approach has been used effectively in the user experience and website development in almost every other industry. In fact, many mobile-first principles have been shown to be best UX practices for any device.  Simplicity and intuitive designs are the main focus points while information overload and crowded formatting are avoided entirely.

Take a look at these 4  simple steps to a mobile-friendly recruitment process to help you get started.

#1 Think About Devices and Roles

Today, there is a wide range of devices and sizes including mobiles, tablets, laptops and traditional desktops. Additionally, the majority of us now use more than one and often several of these devices for one purchase, application and more. It’s not unusual for candidates to view vacancies and research companies on their mobiles before starting their application process on their tablet and completing it on the desktop. There can be many more steps and device switches during this process.

For a truly consistent candidate experience that works every step of the way, all webpages, forms and applicant dashboards need to be fully responsive.

#2 Consider Every Stage of the Process

To ensure you deliver a mobile-friendly experience at every stage you need to consider the entire process and all the steps involved. For example, besides job listings on career sites, you may also have email as a key part of the process. There may be information, documents or forms that need to be downloaded.

As well as ensuring that webpages are optimised for a range of browsers and devices, it’s also vital that you optimise email designs and development for mobiles. Don’t forget that images and other content may take a long time to download on mobile. Are your emails, forms, and other pages still understandable without images? It’s important to test your process from start to finish as if you were a candidate, ensuring you check any rejection emails or other stages along the way to make sure you don’t miss out on a step.

Also to check all the links on your emails. Even mobile-responsive emails can have links to webpages or other content that isn’t mobile responsive or optimised for smaller screens.

#3 Length of the Application

Carefully consider the length of the application process including how it is broken down and how long each stage is. Planning out the candidate experience ensuring you ask the right questions, and get all the information you need while still keeping candidates engaged on mobile devices is a challenge.

To improve engagement, it’s better to break up the application process into parts rather than risk losing applicants by making them complete hours of forms at once. The good news is that this mobile-first recruiting approach is a great best practice for your business, too. By breaking the application up into parts you can eliminate candidates quickly at each stage with pivotal questions or criteria and keep better track of the entire process.

One way to improve in this area is to allow candidates to save their progress and come back to it later. This enables them to start an application on their mobile device and then save it when they need to and complete it later on a tablet or desktop if it’s more suitable.

#4 Content Formatting and Length

As well as the length of the entire process or stages, the content you show on the page is important with a mobile optimised experience. Cluttered or lengthy text and content are difficult to read and digest on smaller screens. Instead, focus on how you can make information clear and concise with simple formattings such as larger font size and line spacing.

For forms, be aware of clicking and screen size. Boxes need to be big enough to click accurately and buttons should similarly be clear and easy to click on small screen size. Even scrolling on mobile devices can be a nuisance; look to see if you can keep things down to one page, allowing candidates to click through each step and showing a progress bar to keep applicants engaged.

As with your emails, check whether there is any content such as video or images that may not download or cause the process to be slow and clunky. While mixed media can be highly engaging for candidates, it’s just as important that the process is efficient and seamless.

Utilise Mobile to Engage Candidates

Beyond simply optimising your recruitment process for mobile, utilise mobile to its full potential as a new way to engage candidates. For example, can you incorporate SMS into your process to keep candidates informed, improve transparency and even make the process more efficient? Text messaging is a great way to keep candidates updated with the current status or changes to their application, or it can serve reminders to applicants that may be stuck at a certain stage of the process and speed up response times.

Ready to deliver a new mobile-first recruiting process to your candidates? With SuccessFactors Recruiting, you can utilise their powerful technology and capabilities to deliver a superior applicant experience that helps you both attract and engage top talent on any device. Talk to our team today to find out more.