Mobile devices dominate both our professional and private lives. In the U.S. alone, 85% of adults own and use a smartphone, while 53% own and use a tablet computer. That popularity has been highly influential in marketing and web design, but organizations still struggle to make their offerings accessible on smaller screen sizes.
That difficulty extends to HR, which has to adapt to tablets and smartphones together accounting for over 70% of all internet traffic. With more than half of all searches likely to occur on mobile devices, your HR needs to stay on top of this trend so potential hires have a greater chance of discovering your company during their job search. Luckily, many HR tools and assessments are geared towards mobile devices, so you could already have the features you need and simply not know it.
Making recruitment and assessments mobile-friendly ensures demographics that prefer mobile to desktop can easily find your job listings, apply, and proceed through your recruitment processes.
App- and mobile web-based recruitment
Most HR teams already possess mobile-friendly recruitment tools. Maximizing their potential, however, could require significant cross-departmental collaboration, such as working with website developers to ensure the application portal on your website is optimized for mobile.
The goal is to make the tools you use to measure, interview, and track candidates accessible to applicants in the cloud. This way, they can complete much of their applicant work in the cloud or on their browser. Consider the following tools and strategies to develop a mobile-friendly recruitment process.
LinkedIn is the world’s most popular recruitment platform, with over 900 million members globally. Of those, the company found 49 million engage in job search activities every week. LinkedIn has traditionally allowed recruiters to direct applications off site. However, with the option for candidates to apply with their LinkedIn profile instead of a resume, you can lower barriers to applicants for lower-level roles.
In addition, LinkedIn supplements any resume scanning software you have by telling you how well applicants match the job profile based on skills, which narrows your pool of qualified candidates. Because most job seekers regularly look for roles on LinkedIn, ensuring they can apply directly on the platform gives you access to the largest number of potential hires. Further, you can ask for their CV and specific qualifications after reviewing their initial details.
Mobile-friendly websites
Work with your marketing department to optimize websites and landing pages for mobile devices. That entails constructing a responsive site that adjusts to screen sizes, minimizing drop downs, and ensuring text enlarges on smaller screens and images resize to fit the content.
This is especially important for forms, which have to alter their size to be large enough so people on mobile devices can easily fill them in and still see the rest of the text. If you’re unsure whether your forms are mobile-friendly, test them on different devices and browsers.
Browser-based hiring
Shifting the hiring process to a browser-based experience is a large undertaking, especially for organizations that lack cloud-based talent management or assessment tools. However, doing so allows candidates to manage every step of their interview and hiring journey in the cloud — anyone with an internet connection can reach it.
Browser implementations can also be significantly cost-effective for companies because many cloud talent and recruitment tools already offer them as an option. That lowers the total expense of building recruitment portals and ensuring everything is integrated into a single system. With these tools, your HRM and HR AI are able to process applicants immediately as well.
Online interviewing
If your organization manages the early stages of the interview process online, your technology must be mobile-friendly. For example, you could adopt a video calling platform that many people either already have or that they can access via a browser, without the need to install software or an app.
Zoom, Google Meet, and even Teams all offer this and other functionalities. For example, you can use transcription tools like the ones built into Teams and Zoom or a standalone application like Otter. Then, recruiters can go over answers in depth after the interview, share their findings with team leads, and compare answers to gain insights.
Mobile-friendly assessments and skills tests
Most organizations use some form of skills or behavioral assessments as part of their hiring procedure. Those tests often include multiple-choice questions and even projects that candidates can complete online in their own time — again, highlighting the importance of mobile-friendly sites and platforms.
The best approach is to keep everything browser-based, with a cloud portal to access skills tests, assessments, and projects. That includes mobile-friendly file upload, portal interfaces designed around mobile usage, and responsive user interfaces that adapt to the device each applicant views it on. Enabling mobile skills assessments makes the process more convenient for candidates, since they can, for example, fill out questionnaires during their commute or while waiting at an appointment; the assessment has a smaller impact on their day and therefore feels like less of an investment.
Conclusion
Mobile devices are becoming the default choice for people to interact with the Internet. With this in mind, it’s critical for recruiters to embrace mobile-friendly hiring practices. When candidates click through to your job listings from their phone, they should be able to apply for the position seamlessly. That optimization alone can improve the number of applicants to a role.
Then, at the interview and hiring stage, implement browser-based portals, video calling, and digital assessments for greater simplicity and accessibility. These options further are often cheaper than applications and traditional calling. As candidates become increasingly biased towards mobile, optimizing your recruitment processes for that platform will improve the hiring experience for both the candidates and your company.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
