Mobile-First Recruitment: How to Track Talent from Anywhere, for Anywhere

You want the right talent to join your team, then you've got to be where they are -- online and on the go. While only 20 percent of all Fortune 500 companies is taking job recruitment mobile, it's essential to move in that direction in a world where more people are connecting via mobile devices than desk-hugging machines.

Today we break down the steps to mobilize your recruitment -- not only to connect with the best candidates, but to save you time and money, too!

Recruit from anywhere!

If recruitment is anything, it’s really sales -- you’re selling the hiring manager on your ability to recruit from in-house or externally, and you’re selling the right candidates on their perfect fit with that same business and manager. And if you are a small business, you are selling your business to the top candidates. You can't do that so well stuck in the office. You need to be ready to move!

There is a slew of recruitment software that keeps you on the road, visiting clients and future clients. Recruitment software allows you to process applications coming from various online sources, lets you take and share internal notes on the process, and then even allows you to onboard the client, often taking them through the entire employment lifecycle.

For Better or Worse: Mobile Enables Video Interviews

There are whole HR companies, like Catenon, enabling recruitment from anywhere in the world for jobs anywhere in the world with recruiters recording face-to-face interviews in their offices. Others like JobandTalent allow its junior-level candidates to record intros, answering ubiquitous “Tell us about yourself” starter questions right from home. Plus, you can simply interview your first or second-round candidates over FaceTime or Skype, getting an add-on to record it.

For recruiters, these video alternatives are good to whittle down the list, acting as a replacement for phone or first-round face-to-face interviews. And for your client, they can invest less work into revising your candidates. This is grand if you think the first impression is the most important one, but with different candidates reacting differently to stilted, recorded interaction, these impressions may be invalid.

No matter if you like it or not, it’s certainly a cost-effective way to screen candidates in the first recruitment rounds, and one that can be done from your iPhone.

LinkedIn Validates Your Candidates

Let’s be serious, candidates can say whatever they want on their resumes or CVs. That’s why there’s something very appealing about the LinkedIn login of both the Workable recruitment software and the TribeHR Workplace Management & HR tool. Its LinkedIn and Indeed.com logins offer a sense of validation of your candidates. It publicly proves their work history and job titles and details, while it also provides you with a wealth of personal recommendations and simple topic-based endorsements.

Then, once you’ve hired a great staff, you could use FinancialForce HCM (Human Capital Management) software to extend that social vibe to the workplace, where you encourage your employees to participate in social feedback, to increase coworker interaction and input.

Plus with more than 300 million LinkedIn users, that’s a sweet pool of candidates!

Fish in deeper, more transparent candidate pools

Now I fully disagree with the trend for businesses to require access to a candidate's Facebook before hiring, as I see it as an egregious infringement on a person’s assumed privacy (while folks should always remember that whatever you put on Facebook is Zuckerberg’s property and thus nothing is ever private.) However, wherever your candidates are posting in public -- their public blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, even Instagram -- is fair game.

Workable is also great because it easily allows you to post on job sites and social media, while you can post to hiring managers. Then it pulls together your candidates' resumes, cover letters, notes, feedback, and interviews, while automatically discovering and adding social media presence, building an easy-to-read broader view of each candidate.

Plus, not only are you able to get more influence on social media, you also get more conversion. TribeHR found that while only one out of every 11 visitors to its site applies for a job, one out of every seven visitors to its social media went ahead and applied. Again, perhaps contradictory to logic, there is some sort of trust that if something is on social media, it must be legit. You may find that in using social media to recruit, you make have a deeper pool of applicants.

As TribeHR put it, “It has never been easier to find and recruit the best people.”

What needs to be the next step in mobile recruitment?

Like with any cloud-based tool, it’s all about the integrations and workflow. Most important, it’s essential that recruitment tools look to create a smoother interface among recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates. Once this happens, the term mobile recruitment will continue to fade as it takes its rightful place as simply recruitment. Most of GetApp's HR and recruitment clients -- like FinancialForce HCM and TribeHR -- already integrate with the number-one CRM-slash-sales-tool Saleforce, along with many other CRMs, sales, and HR tools.

When looking at the crystal ball of mobile recruitment, I also see a future filled with touch-screen psychometric tests, apps that allow for point-by-point comparisons among candidates as part of a trend toward better reporting, and so much more. The prospects seem limitless, so you might as well stop hemming and hawing and just get on board.

So are you taking advantage of mobile recruitment? How do you mobilize your talent search efforts? What do you dream of next? Comment below!