Tips for Building Your Mobile Recruiting Business

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3beKmdfY1Hk wmode=window h=315]

 “There are more mobile phones than there are toothbrushes in the world,” says Joel Cheesman (@joelcheesman), Founder of the mobile application Hungry Thumb.

Cheesman offers up a host of valuable insights into building your mobile recruiting effort. Here’s a collection of his facts and tips:

• People use their mobile phones to respond faster in other ways than making a voice call.
• More and more people are using their smart phones at work to look for a job.
• The most popular time to look for a job is between 11a-2pm on Monday. That means they’re looking for jobs at work. They also know that their Internet use on the company computer is heavily monitored so they’ll use their mobile phone to look for jobs on their mobile device.
• If you have a mobile enabled site you will look like a company that knows what they’re doing. You’ll look a lot more hip to tech candidates if you can do this. If it’s not mobile optimized, you may have lost a potentially great candidate.
• If diversity is key to your recruiting, mobile is incredibly important because Hispanics and African Americans are heavy users of mobile. You’ll be able to reach them with a mobile optimized site, or msite.
• You could use .mobi for your mobile career site.
• If mobile site loads slowly, you’ll lose people.
• When designing an msite, scrolling up and down is ok. Side-to-side navigation is poor. Pinching or squeezing is a bad experience.
• When Pepsi built an msite for their career page they saw applications go up 800%.
• In iMomentous’ analysis of companies’ mobile career sites, McDonald’s was the only company that was completely mobilized.
• There are other ways to reach candidates than just via phone and email. In fact, it’s often the worst way. Texts have a 95 percent open rate. Emails have about a 30 percent open rate. In addition, 95 percent of texts are read within 15 minutes of being received. Emails have a window of about 72 hours.
• According to COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg, only 11 percent of teens email daily. Instead they communicate through texts and Facebook.
• Sixty percent of those over 45 are likely to text as they are to call.
• On Twitter you can sponsor a specific tweet and hashtag. You can reach an audience from a conference that you’re trying to reach by sponsoring the event’s hashtag.
• Put tips on Foursquare that people can see when they check in to a location. If you know when your prospects will be at Starbucks, you can conveniently be there to strike up a conversation.