TMP Worldwide has launched a mobile phone application called TalentBrew Mobile, which its clients could use to make their job listings a lot more friendly to people job-searching on a smartphone.
Matt Lamphear, senior vice president of interactive products at the recruiting ad agency, said that TMP looked at what job boards and others — including TMP itself — were doing with job listings, and realized they weren’t quite there yet. Job listings were being optimized, but they weren’t really being — I’ll sort of coin a word here — mobilized. Says Lamphear: “There’s nothing mobile-friendly about six paragraphs of text.”
So what TMP’s doing is taking your job listings, and parsing out just key information like skills and years of experience, like you see in the graphic above (click to enlarge). You can include other information in the job listing: video, for example, that’s specific to that job. There’s also geographic information; you can figure out how long the commute would be.
Right now, with the application just launched, no one has bought it yet, though one large client is in beta. The cost will vary, depending on what else you have going on with TMP.
Lamphear says the recruiting field, as I’ve mentioned, is still figuring out how mobile phones will be used by job candidates. “What is ‘mobile apply’? That’s really an unknown in our industry,” he says. “The industry standard is to send it yourself and a friend” — meaning that right now, people often use smart phones as a first step, going to their laptop or desktop later.
I asked if applying right from a phone is what’s next. “It’s inevitable,” Lamphear says.
For now, as you see in the graphic at left, the job candidate can apply using their phone, put in some brief information, and later get an email asking them to enter some more information in the applicant tracking system. “At the minimum,” Lamphear says, “the client hasn’t lost the candidate.”