You haven’t mobile optimised your site yet? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know Gen Y, Millennials, and your grand-kids won’t even know or remember what a computer is in a few months time?

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The marketing is out there, your ATS/HRIS vendors are pressing you, every conference you attend has a focus on mobile and your web developers will only be too happy show you how pretty they can make sites look on an iPad.

You know you need this but may not know how “going mobile” works in reality.

Mobile can (and should) change everything:

Much like onboarding, discussed here and here: Allowing your candidates to apply for roles via mobile is not just a matter of purchasing/configuring a tool, continuing as usual and magically tapping into these hip youngsters with funky beards and hairdos.

Does my hair look big in this?

Going mobile means looking at the whole of your internal process both in terms of candidate application workflows and your internal hiring procedure.

Some things to consider:

How much information do you need to start screening a candidate?

Is a full profile required?

• How are you going to get this full profile into your ATS?
• Entering lots of information via a hand held device can be cumbersome and off-putting.
• Do you have the ability to pull profile information from social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook)
• Are you able to include rèsumè parsing?
• How are candidates expected to get their C.Vs on their devices?
• Do you have the ability to tap into online storage tools (Dropbox)

Is the answer to a few pre-screening questions all that is required?

• Remember candidate experience, You will need to make these succinct.

Must you view a C.V.?

• As above: how realistic is it that people applying for your roles have a C.V on their device?

Are you happy with a ‘multi-step’ process?

• Is your ATS set so that you candidates continue with applications after a certain step?
• How are we going to design our communication with candidates around this?
• If extra information is gathered after the initial application, how is this going to be collected?
• Who is going to be responsible.How much extra administration does this place on my recruitment staff?
• Do we need to get additional resource to manage this process?

The above bullet points are only beginning to scratch the surface. Yes mobile is important, but please remember that there is more to it that flicking the magical mobile switch.

As our applicants and companies are getting more social – so too will the candidate experience need to be social also.