If your recruitment campaigns aren’t mobile friendly, then you’re driving away the largest share of the job-seeker market.

68% of all US adults own a smartphone, and they are twice as likely to use them to browse the internet over a computer.

This is especially critical looking at the blue-collar market, as 53% of adults earning less than $50,000 per year are most likely to access the internet via a smartphone. That’s a huge percentage of the job-seeking population.

I learned the importance of optimizing for mobile users while working for Google as the head of their AUS/NZ markets. So, our team at Perengo decided to apply the techniques I’d learned during that time to the recruitment world.

The result was a programmatic approach for recruiting blue-collar workers that optimized for mobile. And we started to see better conversion rates and higher-quality applications for the job campaigns because the digital experience was so much better than it had been in the past.

By making responsive landing pages, trimming down application times, and learning from the data collected, we helped create a significantly improved mobile experience for job seekers.

You can do the same by following these simple, yet effective, steps.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

The landing page is the first thing job seekers see when they come to your site, so it needs to be optimized for mobile.

Many companies may think because their desktop experience has been successful in the past, they can continue using it for mobile traffic as well — regardless of how the user finds their way to the page.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

An outdated or inaccessible landing page creates a barrier to entry for the user, which means they will most likely click away from your site without ever engaging with the job application.

While at Google, I worked with clients to strategize and deploy an optimized mobile experiences. Those interested in being on the cutting edge were guided through the process. This meant designing websites and other mobile experiences (i.e. apps) that were fully responsive and accessible to any mobile device, offering the user a seamless experience to engage with content.

Some small, but impactful, ways you can create a better experience are to:

• Create an adaptive, responsive layout. This means designing with mobile in mind so your content fits any size screen. Be sure to consider images, videos, and animations are working correctly and that your content is prioritized from top to bottom.
• Design for hotspots. Mobile users typically use one thumb to scroll, click, or swipe. By placing the most important content front and center, it’s easier for people to interact with your website or app.
• Simplify forms. It’s tedious to fill out long forms on mobile, especially for job seekers with extensive work histories. To keep people’s attention and ensure they complete your form, stay simple. Even reducing the number of forms lowers the workload for applicants, which can help improve your conversion rates.

Once you’ve convinced a user to stay on your landing page, you can begin to guide them through the application funnel. Ultimately, effective mobile optimization means providing the easiest way to get a job seeker from curiosity to a completed application.

Trim Your Application

The most successful mobile applications retrieve the most pertinent information from a job seeker in the least amount of time.

Job applications traditionally request a lot of detailed information: five years of work experience and description, personal data, references, etc. While this would only take 15 to 20 minutes on a desktop experience, it would take twice as long on a mobile phone. Scrolling and entering long paragraphs on a mobile device is a frustrating process for a user, especially for a job application where there is no guaranteed pay off.

This is why it’s crucial to decide what information on your application is absolutely necessary.

Consider your questions in a series of buckets:

• The A Bucket is absolutely necessary, need to know information.
• The B Bucket is good to know, but maybe not critical.
• The C Bucket is nice to know, but you don’t needit.

By narrowing down your application to include only A and B bucket questions, you’ll greatly decrease the amount of time job seekers are spending with your application. You can then focus on getting them into the interview process where your HR team can truly engage with any follow-up information they may need.

Improving this process will increase the number of applications you receive via mobile users and, therefore, give you a greater chance at finding the best fit for the job in the least amount of time.

Don’t Stop With One Success

You can’t stop with the first round of improvements.

As technology continues to change, job seekers will continue to adapt their habits. This means you must constantly monitor the data you gather in order to further improve the application process.

You can track a few datasets that will allow a programmatic recruitment platform to automatically create the best experience for the job seeker. Some of these are:

• How job seekers are finding your page.
• The types of devices they are using.
• How long they are engaging with your materials.
• Where are they physically located.
• Search terms they are using to find your job.

By continuing to gather data and optimize, you stand to improve your cost-per-hire ratio and a job seeker’s hiring experience. An applicant with a positive experience is more likely to be the right fit for your company and therefore stay for the long-term.

While it takes some effort to offer users the best mobile experience, it’s a critical upgrade for an optimized recruitment strategy.

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About Spencer Parra

Spencer Parra is the VP of Product Management for advertising and data products at Radancy. In that capacity, Spencer and his team of product managers, program managers, data scientists, and data analysts work to develop products in a data driven mindset. As the leader of Advertising products, he works to bring a holistic full funnel approach to Radancy’s advertising technology stack with Programmatic Jobs at its foundation. Through data products, he tells the story of media performance via Radancy’s Metrics Gateway and helps ensure data is democratized through Radancy’s unified platform. Spencer came to Radancy from the Perengo acquisition in mid 2019 where he served as Lead Product Manager and a member of the founding team. With Perengo, he worked towards the vision of leveraging the same rigor and concepts from ecommerce advertising technology to the recruitment advertising space. Prior to Perengo, Spencer launched and supported in-app advertising products at Criteo as a solutions engineer. Spencer holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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