Twitter lead generation cards for recruiters? #socialrecruiting

Twitter lead generation cards are here! If you have no idea what a lead generation card is then your not alone. Check out Twitters explanation. In brief it provides advertisers the opportunity to have a call to action inside Twitter. The action is as easy as following someone - but instead it can send your email address to the advertiser.

Is this what you want as a Twitter user? After reading 140 characters can you make the decision to pass on your email address for future spamming? Well early signs are "Yes" Twitter users are happy to share their details. So is this going to be a long term advertising feature on Twitter or will it go south when Tweeps are getting spammed? Below is a picture to show you what it looks like.

So what about recruitment? Already some forward thinking firms have launched job ads using the Twitter generation card, you can read about it on TNW. But what does the recruiter get? A bunch of email addresses! Is this useful for mainstream recruitment? Probably not. This may be great for certain recruitment circumstances, but for many this is going to completely unmanageable and risks setting a false candidate expectation.

What initially looks like it could be a great mApply solution quickly shows cracks. So how should recruiters embrace this new call to action?

It should be the start of the application process. Simply put recruiters should borrow marketing concepts and use that email address to put people into the conversion funnel.

A registered twitter lead can receive an email inviting the candiate to fully apply. Lead generation is exactly that - attraction not conversion! This may see the CRM recruitment solutions mature and deliver increased ROI, in a similar fashion to their marketing counterparts.

It does not solve mApply. The follow up email is still likely to read on a mobile. This is only a potential game changer for Twitter - they might have found a way to monitise all that talent attraction the recruitment industry has been enjoying for free.

3 steps to prioritising mobile recruiting

When chatting with HR and recruiting professionals the first question is normally "is it worth doing mobile?". The discussion normally highlights that the organisation is very well aware that talent is on smartphone and tablet.

Mobile support involves change or at least something new to think about, so the busy professional finds loop holes to avoid having to add yet another thing to their already busy to do list. I often hear that "our candidates don't use mobile" or "we only want candidates that have committed to applying and can be bothered to go to their PC". Sorry but this is total rubbish just be honest and say "we are too busy, how can we measure the value of mobile so we can prioritise"?

So here are three easy steps to fully understand the value of mobile support to your recruiting efforts:

1. Go to your smartphone an visit your own career / recruitment website.

Can you click the links easily?

Can you read the content or do you have to scroll left right and up down?

Are you zooming in and out?

Does it look correct? Or do some page elements look broken?

If this experience was the first impression would you be impressed?

Can you find jobs?

Can you apply / follow the call to action? Dont just click the apply button try to apply - you will likely get stuck at "upload you CV"

2. Use Google Analytics to check out how many potential candidates are visiting your site by mobile.

This is really easy. Just click on Audience, then Mobile in the Google Analytics menu. You should get two options - Overview or Devices. Overview will tell you the volume of visitors you receive from a mobile. Write this number down as "monthly mobile visitors".

If your mobile experience is poor this is how many people you are neglecting now. The mobile visitor number is your "sure thing" lost opportunity. If you had mobile support you would expect this to higher via SEO on Googles mobile search and increased talent conversion from social media.

Talking to large employers and job boards the average mobile talent use is 20% to 30% of all traffic. Some mobile friendly employers have shared that 30% of all their new hires used their mobile solutions.

If you change the date range you can see the trend of mobile growing!

3. When I talk about mobile I also mean tablet, but how much does that really matter?

In Google Analytics click on mobile - devices. Here you can see if iPad is significant to you? Typically it is the first or second most popular device to hit a career website. You may see Kindle Fire (an Android tablet from Amazon) show up in the top 20. Pay attention to the visitor volume and bounce rate per device. When you fail to support a device the bounce rate will be high - 75% or more!

Planning and prioritising

Now you are armed with some key information to help you prioritise and plan mobile:

a. The experience your site offers on mobile.

b. The volume of talent you are closing the door on by failing to support mobile.

c. The growth trend so you can project mobile volumes in 6 or 12 months.

d. Which mobile devices are most important to support and the role iPad / Tablet plays in mobile recruitment marketing.

Calculating Return

Whats your typical web visit to apply ratio? How many candidates are you loosing? Did you loose more last year to this year due to mobile?

Lets say your a large employer and its going to work out at £30k a year to support mobile - whats your cost per candidate over a year based on the figures you just looked up?

Cost per mobile application = 30,000 / (monthly mobile visits * visit to apply ratio * 13.2) 

The 13.2 is 12 months plus 10% due to increased use of mobile over that period. This does not even include your additional applications due to increased social media conversion or SEO.

If your a staffing / recruitment agency going mobile will be significantly less expensive due to less complex ATS integration, its probably between £2,400 to £10,000 depending on your job volume and branding content.

Cost per mobile application = 2,400 / (monthly mobile visits * visit to apply ratio * 13.2) 

You know what an application is worth to you. You know what damaged employer brand costs you from ignoring the mobile / tablet talent.

Probably one hire a year would break even the mobile investment - do your visitor numbers look suggest only one hire a year? Nope the metrics suggest closer to 20% upwards of all hires could be from mobile.

So armed with a hard metric showing you what your missing and the ROI on going mobile what other project do you have in the pipeline that make the same huge difference to your business?

Mobile probably should be your biggest prioirty in 2013.

You are probably wasting 20% of your budget, at best!

I attended a round table debate recently where a number of heads of recruitment shared how they spend c£3-6m just in the UK a year on attracting and hiring talent. I was shocked at the lack of focus on the conversion funnel and referral opportunities.

Online recruitment has many synergies with online retail. The task in hand is to influence the 'applying' decision (instead of buying decision) of talent. This can not be achieved by marketing bullshit and glitter, if  talent do apply and end up a hire it helps no one if they are disappointed. First impressions count, the candidate experience can turn the talent off very easily. Do you care about that talent that chose not to apply, is it their loss? Or did you just let the best hire ever walk away?

E-Retailers monitor the conversion funnel carefully, the best A/B test everything, with the aim to increase a percentage point here and a percentage point there. The difference of 1% sales conversion can have very large impacts on the bottom line. This focus is not copied by many online recruitment practices. Why not? Do you understand what A/B testing is? Are the tools missing? Or are you too busy? 

Do you know what your conversion funnel looks like? What % of talent land on the home page and ever reach a job ad? What % who get to a job ad apply? Is your messaging, images, videos, job description copy, job description layout, apply button, etc, all the best they can be? In great online companies all the detail is tested, it is not down to one persons opinion. Avoiding the "HiPPO" (Highest Paid Person's Opinion  effect, the best online firms let the metrics select the best approach, and they get right down into the detail! 

To start letting your talents online behaviour do the talking go and find out the % of traffic on mobile that hit your recruitment sites. Its probably around 20%.

Can you now see how much of that traffic "bounced" ie talent that looked at only one page. Its probably a big number and thats the first number to get focused on! Moving on see how many applied? If you can, check out the data of start application to end application?

I know from experience the data will show that the majority of your traffic from mobile is wasting talent. Fix that and your could save £600k - £1.2m depending on your budgets. (assuming you are a company that has budgets similar to those at the round table!).

Using data really is giving you Talent feedback. Its there if you can find time to listen.