It has finally happened. I could sense the moment building. Comments had been made. Questions had been getting more pointed. The glint in the eye was turning into an expectant smile. And when I put the business onto a new mobile phone plan, giving rise to a new handset credit from our network provider, the opportunity was finally snatched.
My wife, tireless mother to Charlie (2) and Bonnie (1), defender and maintainer of the home front, has got herself a new smartphone.
What not so long ago was a highly prized, business-orientated, status symbol piece of equipment, has now become so commonplace, so universal, that it is completely normal to see people in all walks of life and all sorts of professions sporting a touchscreen, web-enabled, mobile phone device. OK, my wife’s main interest might centre around the camera function, and I suspect the first apps downloaded will be Facebook and ABC Phonics, but the point here is that they are now attaining universal appeal. Which means they will very soon be a mainstream part of our everyday lives.
So what does this mean for the recruitment industry? Well it’s pretty simple. Jobseekers once stopped looking in shop windows for “Situations Vacant” signs and moved their jobseeking habits to scanning newspaper job classifieds instead. When e-mail arrived in the 1990’s and jobseekers stopped posting and faxing CVs to recruiters, the online job boards started to spring up, so much so that print media job adverts have had a Leeds United scale fall from grace. And the next step? Jobseekers are going mobile.
A trend is starting to emerge of jobseekers increasingly browsing and applying for jobs from their hand-held web devices. Here in New Zealand, recruitment technology and candidate attraction experts JobX Solutions have launched JobX Mobile. In a recent press release they reveal that:
“Morgan Stanley and Gartner [are] predicting that mobile internet useage will overtake the desktop in the next five years.”
So here’s a question for you: What does your company website and jobs page look like when viewed from a smartphone browser? Go, have a look. What can you see? Nothing? OK, squint really hard. Now do that reverse-pincer thing on the screen with your fingers. OK now you can read it, but it looks pretty lame right? Your proud website homepage reduced to a fragmented mess, viewed as if through one of those old Microfiche Readers.
I can hear all you doubters muttering away at the back there. This is still too fresh, too new, to be relevant or requiring our immediate attention. But how can you be so sure? There is really no doubting the huge increases in smartphone useage (and my wife is certainly not the first Mum to be seen juggling two kids and a smartphone in her hands). This article from a year ago reveals that:
“It took two years to sell a million iPods, it took 90 days for the iPhone and 28 days for the iPad.”
I was further taken aback when looking at my own website’s stats on Google Analytics recently. In the month of May 2011 my own site www.rice.co.nz was visited 78 times from a mobile device, which included 32 times from i-Phones and 27 times from i-Pads.
The mobile recruiting revolution is here and it is gatherining momentum. In New Zealand we pride ourselves on innovation, on quality of delivery, and on putting our best foot forward. This means getting your brand, your website, your jobs page… your window to the world …into a format that is easy for jobseekers to navigate and consume. Props to Candle who seem to be one of New Zealand’s first. Who’s next?
