A number of the big-name innovators in talent acquisition — the Sodexos, the PepsiCos, and others — are all trying to find a smooth way to get candidates using smart phones excited about a job at their companies, to apply for jobs without having to navigate a corporate careers site on the phone, all the while staying compliant with government rules, and not wreaking too much havoc on the employer’s applicant tracking system.
Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.
A page from the Autodesk iPad version
What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.
Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.
Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”
“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”
Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”
Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.
Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.
AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”
Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones. keep reading…
Citigroup has turned parts of its college recruiting site into an iPhone application for students, with added features only for the smart phone users — a project handled in house in 27 days.
