Until about a couple of decades ago, scanning through weekly job postings in your newspaper was crucial to getting closer to your next job. Then came the internet and job portals that played match maker between the job seeker and recruiter, trimming down the time taken for one to find the other.  With the penetration of internet, improved technology and a social media boom, many changes took place in the world of recruitment, such as hiring through social media, video interviews, and primacy given to digital profiles over paper resumes, etc. As humans we’ve always had this never-ending desire to get more, at a faster pace and with ease, in our personal lives; our professional aspirations appear to be catching up here. 

Today, stakeholders at both end of the job search continuum – recruiters and job-seekers – are constantly finding new ways to find each other in a cluttered talent market where the best talent is not easy to spot and the best companies to work for are fiercely competing with each other to find this talent. 

Job seekers today know their worth and are increasingly aware of the lack of good talent in the massive talent pool India has to offer. Candidates now demand a recruitment process that is fast, easy and aligned to what I will call their ‘portable’ lifestyles.  Long-drawn processes in recruitment that include finding a job offline or online, applying for it, waiting for days for a recruiter’s response, getting a date and time to be assessed and then shortlisted for an interview in a brick and mortar set up are on their way out and may be history soon. In this information age, technology makes it a prerogative of worthy job seekers to access and act upon information and opportunities instantaneously and on-the-go! 

Today’s job seekers are tech savvy graduates or professionals who carry their world of opportunities in their mobile devices – smart phones or tablets.  Mobile, therefore, ought to be the next big change in the recruitment space. In fact, mobile is quickly becoming the most preferred way for a job seeker to find the next job. Some stats from a recent Linkedln study illustrate the affiliation of professionals to mobile, when it comes to job hunting:

• 62% of job seekers visit company career page on their mobile
• 36% research job opportunities on phone while commuting
• 51% research job opportunities during coffee breaks on their phone
• 80% research job opportunities on tablets at home after work
• 50% higher conversion if the interface is simple and mobile friendly
   

The war for talent has become a lot fiercer and organizations are trying harder to attract the best talent. Positive talent branding matters and that is why organizations invest considerably in how the job market perceives their brand. Often, a candidate decides which organization to join based on his/her experience during the recruitment process. Going mobile is the first and an important step towards creating the right impression on a job seeker. With India possessing the third largest internet user-base in the world out of which more than 50 percent being mobile-only internet users, going mobile for recruitment appears to be a natural evolution of recruitment, that many organizations are only beginning to realize. 

The e-commerce industry has seen big success leveraging India’s mobile and internet usage trends. It’s time recruitment follows suit. 

What do you think? Is your organization using a mobile recruitment strategy to tap into the twenty first century and on-the-go talent pool?