#TruLondon talks Mobile Best Practice
Day two of #trulondon benefited from a thinned out crowd. The discussion and participation was stronger. The learnings better framed. A great day.
The final set of sessions included a track lead by myself on mobile recruiting. When @billBoorman asked me to do this track, making it the 5th Tru I had ran a mobile track, I decided it was time to name and shame.
For the last few years I have shared the potential of mobile including:
- the big numbers of growth of mobile use, such as more smartphones sold last month that PCs
- the importance of mobile and social media, including Facebook having 400m and growing active mobile users.
- the opportunity created in retail by PayPal, EBay and Amazon who enjoyed a total of c$11bn revenue from mobile last year.
I have presented this message across 3 continents at over 30 events, written two white papers, published info-graphics and many articles. I helped Monster with their first mobile app and introduced the UK job board market to mobile. I have talked to hundreds of corporate and agency recruiters. But other than job boards, is anyone doing anything?
So yesterday it felt time to change the approach. Let’s look at what people are doing, what works and what is terrible. To kick off auditing the top 30 companies in the UK and in the US showed that these business understand mobile is a marketing tool that can boost their revenue. Around 30% had mobile sites to market their services, even more had iPhone apps but less than 2% had mSite support to market their employer brand and vacancies. So recruitment is lagging behind.
The discussion at Tru concluded the adoption was still with early adopters, the value was still not apparent, mainly because CVs / Resumes did not arrive on a recruiters desk with “from mobile” stamped on the top. Some in the room felt this was fair, other felt it was simple dumb and short sighted.
Given that 2% had made an attempt, we took a deeper look at what they were doing. GM motors was interesting here’s the candidate experience…
1. Search Google for Careers at GM Motors
2. Tap link with the title careers at GM Motors
3. Land at a mobile site, and select a country
4. New site, new branding which is confusing, tap on job search
5. New site, more new branding, but can now fill in job criteria, tap search
6. View jobs, branding has stayed the same
7. Tap on a job and view all the details
8. Apply for job, input an email address and tap apply.
9. Receive an email saying “you have registered for job alerts for jobs …”
Before we take this experience to pieces, lets remember this is one of 2% of the sampled companies that have attempted to make use of mobile. So well done for getting out of the gates!
If the early part of the experience had not passed me from place to place like a spent old penny it would have been OKish. As it was, had I actually been looking for a job I guess I would have given up at stage 3. The final step left me uncertain, had I applied for a job? Or was I just on a mailing list?
The problem for mobile recruitment adoption is illustrated well above, there is no best practice. That’s we adoption rates are low- best practice has not yet been defined.
This is mainly hampered by our obsession of taking process from one media channel and squeezing it into a new media channel. With desktop web the industry did exactly this from print to web. And again we are doing it now with mobile. The question is always, how do we get a CV and will or should people be applying from their mobile.
The answer is simple – yes. But just as following your twitter account, or chatting with a recruiter at an event it is not going to have the same polish as a letter written on a PC. The marketing value to attract candidates from mobile Google or Twitter and Facebook is real, the experience and process flow should not impact maximising the channel.
I will post next a heap of good examples from small companies and some shockers from big firms such as Marriott.
Recruiters #fail at #TruLondon
Yesterday was day one of TruLondon, ran by @BillBoorman, as usual it was organised chaos. Listening to the chatter my biggest conclusion is the behaviour illustrated by recruiters is slow to change.
If you have not experienced #Tru it is key to realise that there is no PowerPoint, little structure to ‘tracks’. It’s an audience participated discussion – typically a thought leader will lead the discussion. It is a great two days, with loads to learn.
So what did I take away?
I am a seasoned #Tru attendee and have been to all the London events. They key points for me are the following:
1. To my dismay, most still fail to recognise the value of Mobile web activity and it’s intrinsic link to all established social networks! Smartphones outsold PCs last month, EBay, PayPal
and Amazon generated $11bn from on phone purchases but apparently no one is using them for job hunting or career research – that kind of radical behaviour is just crazy talk!
2. Advising consultants love Fads – it gives them something new to talk about and enlightens their day from repeating their wise words. I understand that. Now don’t get me wrong I am sure the growing platform of Pinterest does have sourcing value, currently their biggest audience is mid US stay at home women. The pond is getting bigger and learning about it is great, but there are other bigger ponds we ignore, this is just a current headline maker! The other fact is Pinterest has significant user base consuming the network from mobile web, yet nearly every recruiter ignores mobile as a channel!
3. 4MAT ran a great workshop on career sites which illustrated some very interesting insights to recruiters mindset. When detailing audience segmentation of the career site the participants captured passive & active job seekers, but missed out existing employees? Now it may be the audience was full of Recruitment Consultants / Agencies but it is a huge #fail.
SEO was in the middle of critical and useless? How people are supposed to find your website baffles me. Clearly your employer brand or agency name is so sort after everyone will flock to it. I am surprised there is not a queue at your gates every morning of budding PhDs wanting to work for you!
Social media was deemed important – oh good.
But to my dismay mobile was pushed back into useless. Oh dear, if that is the case you must be doing it wrong!
Talking with leading European job boards the volume of job seekers via Mobile is critical to their business. How many jobs sent by email are read on mobile, how many of those links are mobile friendly. How many of those ‘important’ tweets and Facebook posts are consumed on Mobile – nearly 50%. It is not difficult or even that expensive, in many cases the entire investment is recouped within a month of going live. If you care about social then wake up and start caring about Mobile! The candidate already does!
4. The biggest, noisiest session yesterday afternoon was “Is the CV Dead?”. Why did you go to this talk? How many CVs do you get through your inbox every day? You already know if it’s dead! Do you review a candidate from snippets of info exposed by Twitter etc? Do you follow that up and find their LinkedIn profile? Then who cares if the CV is dead? Unless you are in the business of writing CVs, what does it matter?
What this does show, is the the industry is most fearful of change. A discussion where you can be told about the change you are already living, and help you feel comfortable about this change is comforting. I can understanding this, the industry was static for so long and then technology introduced new fangled ways- change is tough!
Even better maybe you can waste your time at #Tru remembering the good old days when you had a phone (fixed line maybe with a dial) and a Filofax!
I am ranting and being very picky! There was a lot of very valuable and interesting content and I seriously suggest if you are in London or on Twitter you join in the discussion!
If you are at #Tru today, let’s talk about how to do things better and learn from the experiences in the room.
CareerBuilder know mobile matters
As a switched on social network aware employer, you know you need to expose your employer brand on mobile web. You already know that half of all tweets are read on mobile etc etc. So I will step down from my soap box and assume you have seen the light. So what next? Where do you go to get your jobs and brand on mobile?
The world of mobile agencies is a wild west at the moment, lots of growing companies, lots of cowboys and lots of cash being handed over! If you go to a generic mobile agency they are going to be charging you for behind the scenes database work, the typical CMS will be targeting product sales or editorial articles neither of which are good match for job adverts. These guys will cost you a lot more money and time.
To help you out I am building a small directory of vendors that specialise in mobile recruiting. I will interview each company and review their solutions. I want to be totally transparent – there is no money passing between myself and the vendors. If I feel there solutions have serious faults, or are over priced I will write that. My goal is to help Mobilize the industry.
I recently chatted with Eric from CareerBuilder Mobile, you can check out their solutions here.
What do they offer?
They focus on mSites, instead of getting mixed up in the complexities of native apps. While I believe there is value to the native appStore approach I do feel that every mobile strategy should start with an mSite. So CareerBuilder can really get your mobile strategy moving forwards. They have existing clients all over Europe and the USA.
The solutions are simple and do what they say on the can. Reviewing a number of their clients live mSites shows that the template the product is built around is very flexible. Whilst Eric was not transparent with a rate card, I got the impression that the more bespoke the look and feel the more the cost.
The flexibility in the solution allows for a various options for the candidate to get into touch over mobile. The most effective according to Eric was, using my terminology, is “an extended business card”. This is where the candidate provides contact details and answers 1 or 2 key questions around the application. Unfortunately a quick audit of the showcased clients shows that not all companies are prepared to add a pre-ATS screening step to their recruiting process. Shame, their loss.
What about promotion
CareerBuilder provide additional promotion support including employer branded QR codes – something that is less popular in the UK but works a treat in the US. The sites have been built with SEO in mind and I found them in Google from my mobile.
Whats the sting?
So what about costs? Sorry I can not help at this moment, but contact CareerBuilder and I am sure they will. Even better if you do get prics, please comment on this blog post and share the quote details.
What would I like to see?
Transparency of cost could be better! I expect the difficulty is around how much you may already spend with CareerBuilder.
I would like to see campaign or micro targeted mSites on offer. Just as social and desktop solutions are best used when highly targeted, the market mobile is the same. Do we really have to go through the same learnings again and again?
Any insider gossip?
I was very impressed with CareerBuilders plans for the future. They have a product out soon that will rock your socks! It’s a very cool native solution but with a twist so tight that it could multiply an existing recruiting source the industry knows could do better! I hope to have some leaked preview screenshots and more detail really soon!
CareerBuilder know mobile matters
As switched on social network aware employer, you know you need to expose your employer brand on mobile web. You already know that half of all tweets are read on mobile etc etc. So I will step down from my soap box and assume you have seen the light. So what next? Where do you go to get your jobs and brand on mobile?
The world of mobile agencies is a wild west at the moment, lots of growing companies, lots of cowboys and lots of cash being handed over! If you go to a generic mobile agency they are going to be charging you for behind the scenes database work, the typical CMS will be targeting product sales or editorial articles neither of which are good match for job adverts. These guys will cost you a lot more money and time.
To help you out I am building a small directory of vendors that specialise in mobile recruiting. I will interview each company and review their solutions. I want to be totally transparent – there is no money passing between myself and the vendors. If I feel there solutions have serious faults, or are over priced I will write that. My goal is to help Mobilize the industry.
I recently chatted with Eric from CareerBuilder Mobile, you can check out their solutions here.
What do they offer?
They focus on mSites, instead of getting mixed up in the complexities of native apps. While I believe there is value to the native appStore approach I do feel that every mobile strategy should start with an mSite. So CareerBuilder can really get your mobile strategy moving forwards. They have existing clients all over Europe and the USA.
The solutions are simple and do what they say on the can. Reviewing a number of their clients live mSites shows that the template the product is built around is very flexible. Whilst Eric was not transparent with a rate card, I got the impression that the more bespoke the look and feel the more the cost.
The flexibility in the solution allows for a various options for the candidate to get into touch over mobile. The most effective according to Eric was, using my terminology, is “an extended business card”. This is where the candidate provides contact details and answers 1 or 2 key questions around the application. Unfortunately a quick audit of the showcased clients shows that not all companies are prepared to add a pre-ATS screening step to their recruiting process. Shame, their loss.
What about promotion
CareerBuilder provide additional promotion support including employer branded QR codes – something that is less popular in the UK but works a treat in the US. The sites have been built with SEO in mind and I found them in Google from my mobile.
Whats the sting?
So what about costs? Sorry I can not help at this moment, but contact CareerBuilder and I am sure they will. Even better if you do get prics, please comment on this blog post and share the quote details.
What would I like to see?
Transparency of cost could be better! I expect the difficulty is around how much you may already spend with CareerBuilder.
I would like to see campaign or micro targeted mSites on offer. Just as social and desktop solutions are best used when highly targeted, the market mobile is the same. Do we really have to go through the same learnings again and again?
Any insider gossip?
I was very impressed with CareerBuilders plans for the future. They have a product out soon that will rock your socks! It’s a very cool native solution but with a twist so tight that it could multiply an existing recruiting source the industry knows could do better! I hope to have some leaked preview screenshots and more detail really soon!
