By Robert Cordray
There are a lot of statistics that show that if you want to gain someone’s attention in the modern world, you should do so by smartphone. In fact, the U.S., although only ranked 4th in the world, already counts 72 percent of its citizens as smartphone owners. This holds true for marketing, sales, and now for job opportunities and hiring as well.
The power that you have when utilizing a smartphone application to advertise a job announcement is pretty amazing. If you want to place an ad on Facebook, you can target specific regions and interest areas. You can do similar things on LinkedIn, saving a lot of time because your announcement will only be seen by those that you deem it relevant.
Here are some other specific ways that a smartphone can help you to grow your business when hiring:
Take Advantage of an Application
Although more people tend to use smartphone applications than browse the Internet using their mobile device, it doesn’t automatically mean that they will want to load a job search application. They will, however, routinely load the leading job application search devices because they are used by all the leading elearning companies.
So if you are a small business trying to put together a strategy, one idea is for you to find an application that has a lot of downloads, but not a lot of job postings. Conversely, you can go with the crowd and put your posting up so that the multitudes that do search using those applications will find you.
Use Creative Push Advertising
As a small business, you probably don’t have a large advertising budget. At the same time, with so many people carrying cellphones around, it is possible to put advertisements in front of people that are geographically relevant to the position that you are hiring for. One example is an advertisement that is pushed to people every time they physically enter the two or three zip codes around your office. You can also increase the granularity and send the advertisement only to people that have a certain job search application like Indeed loaded on their phone.
By targeting people narrowly, your campaign should reach the people with a much greater likelihood of actually applying.
Make It Easy To Apply
Although the position that you are hiring for may be quite technical, people are attracted to simplicity in both design and process. So if you would like a lot of response, make it easy for people to contact you and apply. This can be accomplished by using a link from an application to a simple application that launches as soon as it is touched.
As a designer, you should remember that even though smartphones are easy to use, it is rare for them to be able to use a full-size keyboard. So if you require a lot of data entry on your application to answer specific questions, it is a good idea to break your application into two pieces and allow smartphone users to ‘get started’ and come back and fill in the other information later.
Smartphone hiring is a great way to leverage your understanding of technology and how your organization ‘gets it’ in front of the people that you would like to come aboard. If you look for positive ways to stand out to your recruits while you remain within a popular public venue such as an industry leading application or social media site, you can receive a lot of response- as well as some goodwill.
In practice, when recruiting people who use smartphones, the size of your organization will not matter if your recruitment is done well- giving you much more advantage that you would have had 20 years ago.
Robert Cordray is a former business consultant and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience and a wide variety of knowledge in multiple areas of the industry. Follow him at @RobertCordray.
