Internet via the smartphone is fast becoming the next mass media channel. Social media is the dominating the mobile web, recent comScore stats show 80.4% of the mobile Internet audience is consuming Facebook. On average this is 7 hours 21 minutes of Facebook time per user on mobile every month, which is nearly 1 hour more a month than desktop Facebook usage.

Facebook mobile users have a choice of consuming the native downloadable app or using Facebook’s mSite. 80% of mobile Facebook users consume the native mobile app. Twitter shows an even larger app consumption with 96% of mobile Twitter users preferring it to the HTML5 mSite. This data has confused many industry commentators, with many bloggers in the mobile space writing  “Apps are winning the App vs HTML5 battle”. This interpretation is wrong.

Unfortunately such mistaken onlookers, have driven many talent acquisition directors to ask me if they should develop a mobile recruiting application and forget about optimising their mobile websites. First up, lets be very clear, your mobile recruiting strategies should have nothing more important than offering your candidates an optimised mobile website. Here is why…

Facebook, Twitter etc are channels, we all “browse” media through these social channels. A native mobile social media application, downloaded from Google Play or Apple AppStore, offers us a better experience so we can more easily enjoy and interact with social media. Our Internet consumption behaviours have changed significantly over the last 7 years. The people and businesses we follow within social channels curate web content which we discover and consume. The Twitter and Facebook apps are our preferred window to consume the web, not only do these apps direct us to new content they fetch it and display it for us in one place.

Frequently we click links on Twitter from our mobile app and the webpage loads in our Twitter app – we do not take the URL and open a web browser and read the content. Social channels are the true ‘Browsers’ we do not have to search or have a pre-conceived idea of what we are looking for. Instead we browse the social channel and when we see something we like, we order up more content by tapping the hyperlink.

Empowered with the knowledge that Twitter and Facebook apps on our mobile are the new browser, and knowing the enormous volume of users and time spent consuming these channels what do you feel matters when it comes to mobile recruiting optimisation? As recruiters wishing to reach a market it is very simple – a mobile optimised career site / recruitment campaign coupled with social media activity puts your message infront the audience. The same mobile optimised app will attract candidates from Google mobile searches, putting you in front of those people actively seeking.

Check out the top mobile native apps – Instagram, Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, etc. These are platform or pure entertainment. As a user I expect to return to these apps frequently either for fun or social interaction or new content. Looking for a new job at a single company is not a repeat process. The effort and reward of downloading an app to work at just one company does not add up. The native app will attract downloads from those doing additional research, those really interested in your firm – these people have probably already applied for a job. Unless your employer brand creates incredible hunger and has millions of people desperate to work for you – an app in AppStore or Android is unlikely to deliver high ROI when it comes to talent attraction.

The mSite is becoming a must have for candidate marketing, the mobile app is typically better positioned to assist the selection and on boarding process.

(First published on ere.net)

The last few mSite reviews have created a number of requests from innovative recruiters and mobile recruiting vendors. These folk are asking me to look at their solution and highlight the great features, while knowing I will point out the mistakes. As a mobile evangelist I am very pleased to see the increased activity within the recruitment industry.

Peter Gold is one such chap, asking me to review his companies latest mobile solution. The case study that launched last week is an mSite for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts in the UK. So is it any good?

What does it offer the candidate?

The mSite gives the candidiate access to some introductory information on Krispy Kreme, an immediate view of available jobs, an advanced job search and a basket to save jobs to.

The content to ‘sell’ the company appears to have been written specifically for mobile and is very easy to read. The navigation between the articles is slightly confusing, the page you are currently on remains an option to click, this could be a bit more polished.

The job results are presented in large green buttons, which makes it very easy to tap through to view the job. But on different devices the two shades of green did make it difficult to read the location which is position over both shades. On an older HTC Android device the contrast really made this a problem, on my iPhone it was ok.

The job data is easy to read, with a large font used. The apply process is detached from the ATS and drives the candidate on a journey to add jobs into a basket. The journey pushes the user to email their basket to their desktop to finish the apply process. When the candidate receives the job basket email the process feels very joined up and integrated with with main desktop site.

The job search offers a great deal of search criteria, including miles from a postcode. It was disappointing that the mSite expected me to input my postcode manually instead of giving an option of using the device to workout where I am standing. The level of search criteria feels significantly overkill for what appears to be 17 available vacancies.

What would I like to see in the future?

The desktop career and marketing site shows off a Twitter and Facebook feed, so does the mobile marketing site, it is a shame that social media was missing from the career mSite.

The site is very fast, but some richer media would be nice. This can be implemented on pages to click though to such as a gallery of images which sets the candidates expectation around download speed. The focus on fast to load has lost an element of branding when compared to the desktop. I would like to see simple CSS3 used to deliver a more consistant feel for smartphone users that support it. (which is most of them!). I am not sure what devices the site was tested on, but there are a few polishing tweaks needed such as on an iPhone 4S where the job search field labels go slightly underneath the input boxes. (See picture at end of article).

The logo has been heavily compressed and on my iPhone 4S did not look good, on a iPhone 3G or a HTC Wildfire (both older devices with low res screens) it look great. Unfortunately on the HTC and an year old Samsung the layout was broken, both have only a 200px wide screen, which it quite small by todays huge standards. I would like to see mSites that adapt to the device capabilities. Previously I reviewed CareerBuilders Mobile solutions, they support a low res version and a high res version to deliver the best experience for each user. I look forward to mobile recruiting evolving so we see more delightful experiences for candidates with newer smartphones.

The basket feature is an interesting concept, and I was impressed with the faux attempt to make it feel integrated with the main website. When the email arrived to direct me to the desktop the journey took me to a basket on the main site. However as I navigated to other eye catching areas of the main site I had no way back to my basket, which seemed to only exist when I follow the link from the email. Many of the roles were management positions, the perfect linkedIn demographic, it would be great to see an apply with LinkedIn option?

As the mobile is not a great data input device the basket concept feels sensible, but the candidate journey needs to evolve. I would really like to see this tested and the vocab / experience developed as candidate mobile behaviour is fully understood.

The journey from Google was disappointing. The top result on my iPhone for “Krispy Kreme Careers UK” is the single career page on the companies own marketing website, which on a desktop links to the career microsite. I clicked this result, it redirected to an mSite, but there was no careers page. So I could not find their mobile recruiting career site, which will significantly impact their visitor count. I imagine that as this is very early days in the launch cycle, we are experiencing a hiccup that is being looked? The fix is a few lines of Javascript or server side code. The careers mSite was on the first page in Google, but not position 1 or 2 (yet).

Final Words…

Again, as always I am pleased to see a company supporting mobile Internet instead of ignoring it. So well done Krispy Kreme and well done to Peter & team. I am currently working on an detailed review of the top 30 companies in the USA and Krispy Kreme is already ahead of most of these enormous organisations!

The promotion around this launch from Peter Gold has focused on one of my favourite phrases SoLoMo – Social Location Mobile. This mSite is Mo but has no Social or Location services, I look forwards to Peter’s evolutionary development of this mSite that I am sure will fullfil the meaning of my fondest buzz word!

If Krispy Kreme or Peter  will allow, it would be great to sharing the metrics associated with launch in a future blog post.

The site is aimed at the candidate and focuses on attracting connections, either candidates showing interest in jobs or connecting via social networks to Eurostaff.

Who built the site?

I understand the site was built by Strategies Group who develop sites for a range of industries including recruitment. I took some time to look on their website to learn more about their mobile solutions but unfortunately I could not find anything.

I did notice that their site itself was not optimised for mobile.

What does it offer the candidate?

In summary the mSite provides news about Eurostaff, jobs, contact via email or phone and connect via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I like the headline aims and feel the goals of this project are very aspirational.

The site design is very simple, maybe too standard, but it is highly compatible with a massive number of mobile devices. Maybe a future goal would be enhance the site for those with more modern smartphones. The simplicity does mean it is super fast! The first page is 4k so it will load via wifi in about 1 second!

The implementation is basic, which is not a problem as it is version one, but I have some suggestions for version two.

What I would like to see in the future…

The navigation needs some attention, the back button is simple and familiar to iPhone users (not so much Android users) however it does scroll off the top of the screen when I use the site. It would be better if it stayed in sight. I got slightly confused with what to tap, the design is not clear. For example when on the browse by category screen, I kept trying to tap the title thinking it was part of the navigation. I know this sounds small and perhaps I am being picky, but if it confuses a candidate it may well loose the candidate.

The job description is well laid out but the call to action to apply is not well executed. As a candidate I read the job title, then the description which involves scrolling down the page. I reach the bottom of the page, and think “yep, thats for me” but there is no call to action. I have to scroll back to the top to find an apply. When I tap the apply / email button my email client opens, I have left the site and there is little instruction as to what I should write in the email.

The news feature provides information about Eurostaff, which is useful-ish for the candidate to learn more about Eurostaff. Unfortunatley the artilces available to read have been cut off after about one and half sentences. It reduces the features usefulness.

The social network buttons take the user straight to Eurostaff page on the related network site. These could have deep linked to the mobile versions instead of leaving it up to Twitter etc to redirect me to their mobile sites (it is slower). The LinkedIn button does not redirect to touch.linkedin.com on my iPhone forcing me to use the desktop version. I would have preferred to see these buttons ask me as the candidate to follow / friend / connect and then login as required. This would have taken more development time to integrate with the social network APIs.

The design really is very basic, it functions and I can not flaw its super fast speed, but at least change the standard iPhone style header bar and back button, it just merges into mobile Safari so much it becomes invisible. Since the header bar is being used, it would have been nicer to put header text in it and save on real estate.

One feature I would encourage Eurostaff to add sooner than later, which fast becoming mSite best practice, is a link to their desktop site. It may well be I am happy pinching and zooming on my iPhone or a Samsung Note (which is huge).

Final words…

Overall, I was pleased to see the content was up to date, and very happy to see Eurostaff take the initiative to go mobile. They are still in the minority – so WELL DONE!

I am sure they will enjoy the benifits of being on mobile and with success under their belts invest further to increase their ROI by implementing at least a couple of my suggestions.

Be sure to update me when version two is live and I will re-review!

I recently posted about Adobe Shadow a new tool to help mobile web development. Yesterday I downloaded the beta and tested it out. Using Shadow was like a breath of fresh air and helped pinpoint the cause of a real CSS bug with high efficiency, without shadow it would have a been a real stubbon issue. Shadow extends the Chrome developer tool to mobile.

I was very impressed and recommend any website developer who cares about mobile to download it now – it is free.

Using a small set of devices (see photo), some in portrait, some in landscape, Shadow made is very fast to test and debug. Here is how to get started…

1. Download Adobe Shadow an install on your desktop. (This is the gateway, “helper” app, between your computer and your mobile devices.)
2. Download the Google Chrome plug in for Adobe Shadow. (This is the UI to the tool)
3. Install the native Adobe Shadow app for each device, get this from the respective app store, download iPhone, download Android.
4. With Chrome and the Adobe Shadow helper app open on the desktop, open Shadow on one of the mobile devices. As long as the device is on the same wifi network it should scan and then show your computer.
5. On the device tap your computer name, the device will show a PIN
6. Click on the SD Chrome plugin icon and select the device you trying to connect and enter the PIN. Now your device is paired.
7. Repeat the pairing step (4 & 6) until you have all your devices paired.
8. Now browse a website. – All the paired devices will load the same webpage.
9. You can quickly scan the devices and test for errors.

This browse and follow feature is cool, but what if you find a fault? You really want to debug it and find exactly what is happening in the rendering engine for that device. Well you can! To debug on one of the devices…

1. Open the Chrome plug in (click the SD icon in chrome)
2. It will show a list of paired, connected devices. For the device you want to debug click the ” icon next to the device name.
3. The Chrome developer inspection tool will open, give it a few seconds, it will connect to the device.
4. You can now use the Chrome Developer Tool elements inspector and see the results on the device. This lets you see the classes, the metrics for tags and lets you tweak them in real time. THS IS COOL!

If you have ever chased rendering bugs before on mobile you will apprieciate that the above is fantastic! The inspector does have lag, but that is expected given the remote over the network communication and it is still in beta.

It a real sign that mobile web development is finally mainstream when large companies such as Adobe invest money in developing this kind of tool. Adobe say they support iOS, Android, Blackberry and WinPhone. I could not find the WinPhone app, it may not be live yet. (see comment from Bruce Bowman, no commitment to supporting the latter)

All website developers are familiar with the pain of testing cross platform. It is much better today than it once was, but it is still painful testing and tweaking CSS or Javascript to work consistently across IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Mobile multiplies the problem!

How many different smartphones and tablets can you test on?

The big hitters – iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) sounds like two but it is not! Just with Apple there is iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad, iPad2 and iPad3. Then there are various levels of iOS version which include tweaks to Safari. Just testing on each main Apple device and two OS levels say 4.2 and 5.1 is 12 different targets to test on.

Then adding Android makes things really complicated, there are dozens of different devices all with different screen ratios and different resolutions. Android also offers different browsers, such a the popular Opera Mini. These different combination would deliver 100s of different targets to test on.

Clearly, comprehensive cross platform testing is not feasible, not only would it cost tens of thousands of pounds in devices but it would take thousands of hours. The professional mSite development shops have an array of most popular devices and based on experience test on the key platforms. Even if this is just 8 devices it still takes hours, controlling each device is slow, then tweaking CSS and retesting on the device increases the time it takes. Trust me, one simple mSite page can take hours to test and tweak cross major platforms.

Adobe have observed this pain point in mSite development. From inside the Adobe Labs there is a new product currently in beta called Shadow. Adobe Shadow is free to download.

So what does it do? It enables you to load an mSite on many devices at the same time from your computer. As you browse on the computer all the devices follow. Just this is a serious time saver, but they empower the developer to target one of the devices and change the CSS in realtime to fix a bug. This brings the power of the browser “developer toolbar” to mSite development.

You can watch a video from adobe here that shows off Shadow.

I regularly end up in a discussion that starts with some luddite, “Tablets are never going to take off”, today Apple shared some figures that now can shut these fools up! Q4 2011 Apple sold 15.4m iPads, this is more PCs than any manufacture managed to sell in the same time period. More iPads than HP or Dell PCs were sold in Q4 2011.

iOS as a platform now has 315m devices out their in peoples hands!

On 16th March 2012 you can, if your quick, get your hands on a new 3rd generation iPad. As with any release which is an upgrade it is so tempting to start asking “why”. The single biggest reason is it will look so damn good! The screen is simply huge resolution – bigger than HD TV. This is going to have to be seen to convince many, but reading text and editing photos with the new iPhoto for iPad will convince most!

The new device has a quad core A5 processor which in the keynote handled some great graphics. As well as super fast graphics it supports 4G. The keynote demonstrated how fast 4G networks are, which only made me depressed! In the UK there is no 4G coverage as yet

Instead of a jobs like, “and one more thing”, the keynote ended by telling us to watch out, this was just the start for 2012! Is this a sign that the TV by Apple may be coming, as hinted to in the Jobs biography? Or is it suggesting iPhone 5 will be the huge leap it needs to be in order to gain market share back from Android?

When BlackBerry is loosing market share at a dramatic rate in USA and Europe it is difficult to understand what is going on. Under the covers it is not really the BB that is winning, instead it’s the data plan that comes with it. Data access is not cheap in South Africa, but various carriers offer unlimited data for BB IM, Facebook and email. For years such a package has only been available with the BlackBerry securing them as the untouchable market leader.

Today the game has changed. Nokia have launched a partnership with www.nashuamobile.com offering similar unlimited data deals with their Symbian range of smartphone. The obvious hurdle that Nokia must leap is BB IM, as so many people use it. However as Facebook is the no one reason people get connected in this market, it may be able to circumvent that issue.

We could have South Africa bucking all world wide trends with Symbian and BBos as number 1 and 2 mobile platforms. Elsewhere in Africa Android has capitalised with such data packages and budget devices, but as yet they have not got a stronghold in South Africa.

It is worth remembering, and a sober lesson to all the geeks like me, it’s not just about the gadgets the Eco system and market drivers can make or break a product – regardless of the product quality.

Thanks to @art2gee for sharing the latest market movements with me!

Since Google launched Android and entered into the mobile eco system arena to compete with Apple, they supported “Market Place” which went head to head against “AppStore”. Now that has changed. Google have rebranded to “Google Play”.

So what is Google Play?

It is a consolidation of various Google services under one brand. In reality it is Google’s answer to iTunes and to Amazon. Both iTunes and Amazon sell video, music, books and apps for consumers to enjoy on their respective devices – iPhone, iPad and iPod or Kindle and Kindle Fire. The media selection is pretty good with all obvious new releases available. Google Play further pushes Google’s checkout service, which competes with PayPal to provide one click purchases.

I was very impressed with the initial offering, and the “in the cloud” stream services Google are offering. Whilst this change means very little to the early adopter who was capable of interacting with individual Google services prior to the consolidation, it means a lot to the mass market. The service is easy to user, very (no shock here) easy to search and will really help Android boost its app & media sales, which is an area they are a long way behind Apple.

Check it out here… http://play.google.com/store – do you think more people will Play with Google?

Before digging into the services they offer, 4MAT make an impressive effort to educate the recruitment industry, with case studies, info-graphics and regular blog posts about mobile Internet. You can read about their mobile services on their website, although it needs the statistics updating – we are now in 2012.

Through the 4MAT case studies and the data they shared with me, they see an all too typical picture. In 2011 6% of recruitment agency websites (50+ sampled) traffic was from a mobile, which is incredibly low compared to other industries. Investigation showed a lack of mobile optimised recruitment websites was a key issue. The industry is simply disappointing the candidate. Today 4MAT are pleased to report their most recent mobile optimised clients generates the same page views per visit and bounce rate on mobile as the desktop version – providing a better experience for the mobile job seeker.

What do they offer?

4MAT provide entire digital solution, the mSite, the desktop website and design. The mobile solution functions from the same database as their desktop website, reducing key input and the need to integrate any additional systems. Reviewing some of their clients live mobile websites shows support for video, job search, apply, email job, the ability to ring a consultant and more.

The service is comprehensive, although I did not see anything specific to social media. I tested the RWE nPower site and the Fircroft sites from a Google search and was pleased with the automatic mobile detection. Both sites function very well on my iPhone and an Android device.

What about promotion?

Chatting with 4MAT they shared various promotional support they had provided clients including  QR codes and SMS campaigns. The sites are highly SEO friendly.

Whats the sting?

The cost of the mSite is dependent on various parameters and can be purchased on its own or as part of a package with the desktop site.

Similarly to CareerBuilder (reviewed a few weeks ago) there needs to be full quote process to provide an accurate cost. Again this is a shame, as it would be great to discuss the cost benifit.

What would I like to see?

The 4MAT desktop career sites are very aesthetically and highly branded. I would like to see more of this high gloss design carried across to the mSite. I understand that their technical team is aiming for max mobile support, but most of todays modern smartphones handle HTML5 and CSS3. I am sure the branding can be more prominent without increasing the web page size too much.

The one site offered me the chance to apply with existing profile for that company, should I have one. While this was great to see – good work guys – I wonder if you can crack the code and let me create a quality profile from the phone? (Apparently they are working at this in the 4MAT Lab)

I understand the mSite is running from the same CMS / Database as the main desktop career website but it would be great if the job descriptions were written to target the device. Some of them were very long. I mentioned this to the 4MAT technical team, apparently they already support this, but do not have a live client making use of it just yet. It is a shame that the recruiter does not yet fully recognise the potential of mobile, I am sure that over the next 12 -18 months this will change.

Any insider gossop?

A little birdie tells me they are ready and willing to support apply with LinkedIn from the mobile. I have not seen this done yet be anyone – I know Maddle.nl were talking about it. So let me know when I can see it in action.

The guys at 4MAT have promised to share stats with me in a few months time for the RWE nPower mSite – so keep you eyes open for that.

Recruiter: “We do support mobile, here’s the URL but mobile does not perform very well, none of our candidates use mobile”

Me: “All your thousands of jobs are available and no one wants to look at them? What happens if I visit your desktop career site on a mobile?”

Recruiter: “You get the desktop career site”

Me: “What happens if I search for your brand in Google and click a result pointing to your career site from my mobile?”

Recruiter: (tries it for the first time) ” You get our desktop career site”

Me: “Do the job links you tweet redirect to the mobile pages if I am on a smartphone?”

Recruiter: (low mumble) “umm no they just go to the desktop site”

Me: “So how does anyone find your mSite? Automatic redirect is very easy get your vendor to implement that for you. Then let me know if your candidates are on mobile”

Hosting a mSite that no one can find is a tick box exercise. As far as I am concerned, if I Google you on my mobile and the careers page remains a desktop site – you do not support mobile Internet.