RWE nPower’s mobile traffic has gone from 8% to 16% within four months of the launch of their mobile site in Feb. The other thing we are seeing on our mobile sites is a higher rate of returning visitors, along with a lower bounce rate showing a higher engagement.

Many of our clients are creating highly effective mobile landing pages, to support their offline and online campaigns. With highly relevant content and good use of video, they are finding very good responses through this use.

Details of one such site we launched a while back can be found here: http://www.4mat.com/tpp-mobile-website

Cheers,
Keith

Hi Steve. In general I agree, but my point was that this is not brain surgery, and one of your statements here goes to that point. The nuts and bolts of the connectivity may be an IT issue, but as an HR/Recruiter, you own that. It’s up to you as the owner of the system to look at it from the applicant’s point of view. It’s up to you to make sure the contract is in order so if the feed between the systems goes down, it gets dealt with in a timely manner and security isn’t compromised. And it’s up to you to get enough quotes for ATS systems to make sure you’re getting a competitive price, for the base system and for customization.

The attitude of kicking the can, or ownership, for different aspects of the system and its implementation to different departments is what happens when you go so corporate as to resemble the DMV and lose accountability. You get these kinds of results when people are more concerned with avoiding responsibility than taking it. As the recruiter at my company, it was my job to make sure the ATS system was implemented right, to make sure everyone got some training on how to use it, and to make sure the applicant experience was acceptable. If these companies are indeed so great, it begs the question of why no one stepped up and took responsibility for avoiding the foreseeable issues they’re currently having.

@Dave – I agree 100% and commented in this issue in the report – if the redirect is not there, it is as if the mobile optimized site does not exist.

But it actually gets worse.

Another pitfall we cite in the report is when the company has a corporate mSite with no Careers link on it (only 23 out of 141 have a careers link). Because it’s the corporate mSite, they set up the redirect. Then when you use your common sense approach of searching company name and careers – you click the careers link and it detects your device and redirects you to the Corporate mSite with NO link to careers, you cannot even get to careers.

What’s also weird is that of the 23 that have a link to careers, only 7 lead to an optimized career site – the rest is like running into a brick wall.

Anyway – clearly a long way to go for most companies.

The simple fact is that it takes a lot of effort to do it right and some companies just do not have the resources to get it done on their own.

We have put a lot of thought into making it easy for any company to implement a fully branded social or mobile recruiting solution. Our technology helps employers hire the best by building talent communities of highly engaged candidates. Find and engage relevant candidates where they exist on social platforms and mobile apps, and help candidates to stay connected to you and keep up with your available opportunities.

This is a subject on which we are intensely focused right now.

In support of the “Steves”, who all have valid points, rather than focusing on what some company has not done, or done well, why not focus on giving companies the tools they need to accomplish their social and mobile recruiting objectives.

1. Search for company name careers in Google on a mobile. eg General Motors Careers
2. Click the link that is returned which is clearly the company and careers site.
3. Review it for mobile optimisation.

If the company has invested money, time and effort into an optimised mobile site but is failing to SEO or device detect and redirect then as far as candidates are concerned the company is NOT mobile optimised. I think this situation might be sadder than not doing it at all. The problem with this tick box situation is they company will struggle to get any value out of mobile – since no one can see it – then they will write it off as a waste of time and money, which will be a BIG MISTAKE.

If you are reading this and have completed mobile optimisation go and see if you can be discovered – if NOT then you to fix this!

@Richard – disagree…the competitive differences between the top ATS’ is so slim as to make the purchase decision one that is based on factors other than performance. How these ATS’ are customized is what leads to a poor customer experience. As far as being poor shoppers, CareerXRoads’ secret shopper research shows otherwise. Finally ERP/ATS connectivity is an IT decision not an HR/recruiting one.

I think your clients are poor shoppers. I work for a medium sized company and yes, SOME of the custom stuff they offer is expensive, but the application process is highly configurable and part of the set up process, and those configurations are cheap or even free most of the time. I shopped around for several ATS systems and this was true of all of them. My guess is they wanted to get their ATS from the same vendor as their ERP or payroll for integration purposes, because the feed between such systems is a pain in the ass to set up and maintain.

But to answer your question – here are the 20 F100 companies with mobile optimized career sites in F100 rank order:

General Motors
General Electric
AT&T
Verizon Communications
CVS Caremark
Citigroup
UnitedHealth Group
Microsoft
Boeing
PepsiCo
Dell
Comcast
Best Buy
Prudential Financial
Morgan Stanley
Google
Humana
Aetna
American Express
Tyson Foods

The 2 in the Fortune 100 that have an apply process are Humana (F79) and Tyson Foods (F96). In the Fortune 500 – there are another 9 that have mobile apply. The best overall we found was McDonald’s currently at Fortune 107.

Can you please share who those 20 are?

“The real cop out is that only 2 of the Fortune 100 let the job seeker apply all the way on the device.” Yeah – so any other work done is pointless. Who are those 2?

The real cop out is that only 2 of the Fortune 100 let the job seeker apply all the way on the device. This means when a job seeker gets to the point of applying – they are told to email themselves a link to the job – which is really dumb because don’t most of us check email right there on the mobile device? Might as well ask them to send a Fax. (i digress)

Lot’s more data in the report – definitely worth a download http://www.imomentous.com/download

http://disqus.com/ PLEASE.