Information availability and quality are rapidly defining efficiency for modern day businesses. With the ever-increasing reliance on information, business professionals are demanding access to information systems anytime and anywhere.  Starting from the need to connect with prospective talent to accessing enterprise records, more and more HR professionals feel the need for accessing information to meet the pressing issues of their business constituencies. From the supply side, more and more developers are building apps to meet this ever-increasing demand for anytime, anywhere HR. Apps are standalone products built for any kind of computing environment (desktops, mobiles, tablets) and are typically characterized by rich features and a friendly user-interface for efficiently executing a specific set of tasks. Many confuse apps under the broader cluster of social networking; it has to be understood that apps are actually engines for executing tasks within a medium and that they’re not necessarily the medium themselves. Owing to their specificity, apps are easier to navigate and fundamentally faster than a full-service web site or a social networking platform, thereby making them popular tools for quick and efficient information access. Some of the common app families popular with HR professionals are as follows.

As mobile applications get more widespread acceptance in the talent market, provisioning HR apps will become an important channel for attracting, engaging, and retaining talent, as well as managing HR organizations of the future. To have an idea of the importance of mobile apps for talent management of the future, Apple stated that between 2008 and 2011 there were 15 billion job application downloads from its App store; the same number took the iTunes store twice as many years!