A Mobile Recruiting Checklist

To help you better understand mobile optimization, I have prepared a simple checklist, taken from my 2012 mobile recruiting guide.

Are you building great relationships from your career website when candidates visit on mobile? If you haven’t considered the following, you could be damaging your employee brand.

Do users have to pinch and zoom on their devices in order to view all your content?
Does the top of page navigation fill the screen so users can’t see the content without scrolling?
Are links very small, making them difficult to tap with a finger or thumb?
Does your site have large images that take up valuable space on the device screen?
Does your site use hover (or drop down) menus? These won’t work on most mobile devices
Do your sites have lots of popup boxes? These can massively damage the mobile navigation experience
Does your site have a large graphic as a header at the top of the site? It will push important content off a small screen
Is your site copy heavy? The text may be too small to read on a mobile device, and most users prefer graphics, images, and videos.

Are you emailing your job seekers or engaging in social media? Considering the following will provide you immediate increased return from your efforts.

Are your emails easy to ready on a mobile? Make sure the candidate is not scrolling horizontally and that call to actions are big enough to tap.
Do hyperlinks in emails or posted in social media redirect to mobile content? Given the volume of candidates who will follow these links on mobile, you could risk brand damage and very high bounce rates away from your campaign efforts.

Could your site load faster on mobile? This section is quite technical so don’t worry if it is difficult to follow. You should however make sure any mobile partner or supplier you choose to work with has a good understanding of these issues.

Is content pulled in from many domains? Mobiles do not cache in the same way as desktops so the increased server requests caused will result in slower performance.
Are images used when CSS3 could be used? CSS3 is typically going to be faster and with very small download data size, resulting in a better candidate experience.
Are there lots of HTTP requests; could sprites be used? Lots of small images result in lots of individual requests to the server for graphics; sprite techniques allow the images to be retrieved in one request.
Does the site expect the client to cache large files like images or JS? Some desktop sites load large images or scripts on the first page and expect that data to be present for future pages. On mobile it is less likely the data will be available on future pages resulting in repeated downloads and slow performance.
Does the JS rely on large third-party libraries?
Are Java plugins, Flash, or Silverlight technologies used? Many plugins such as Flash are not available across all mobile operating systems.
Are videos encoded at high quality so they need high bandwidth? Various alternate video encoding methods exist that are designed for mobile performance.
File size is not just about bandwidth speed but also impacts the rendering (drawing) time of the browser due to the mobile having less computing power.

Delivering a consistent and high performance experience across smartphone operating systems is difficult. You must ensure that your solutions partner is testing across a wide variety of devices. Make sure you see the site on a 24-month-old Android and older iPhone, not just the latest shiny hardware.