Is Mobile Technology the Solution for Recruitment Processes?

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David Rice
David Rice
07/06/2020

recruitment technology

The expectations of candidates going through the recruitment process are growing as this vital, first interaction with your potential employees can tell the candidate a great deal about the company and the people who manage it.

If your processes are slow, bulky, paper driven or reliant on a resume, the prospect may take that as a sign of how the company does business. And that isn’t a good look in the 21st century. Our lives, our experiences, everything is online. Employers need to follow suit and create a recruitment process that offers the same digital experience they’d get in making a major purchase or researching a new product.

To do this, companies need to look at the materials that inhabit the transaction. Take, for example, the business card. It’s a valuable tool at conferences, job fairs and even in a first interview. But how effective is it? Research shows that close to 90% of business cards are thrown away within a week of being given to someone.

As HR professionals revealed through polling questions during a recent Blue Social presentation as part of our annual HR Tech North America Digital Summit, HR’s people focused nature positions it as a bridge between people and the business. With that in mind, it’s up to HR teams to find the best ways to connect with and highlight the value of the company to potential prospects, while simultaneously finding new and effective ways to vet candidates.

At the Cutting Edge

HR technology has long been evolving and impacting the way job seekers view companies and acquire new positions. But now, as the cloud and things like social media have come into play, the environment is more user driven and customizable than it ever was before.

Social networking sites are pervasive to modern life and are playing a bigger role in the recruitment process. Many are offering specific features to companies to pursue passive and active job seekers and are another way to connect with candidates who can enhance the brand.

“Social media channels are complementary to outward facing market efforts,” Christen Montero, Chief Marketing Officer at Blue Social said. “It’s not just brand awareness, but what I would call employment branding. Companies are now beginning to use their platforms to build relationships with job seekers who are often consumers before that. The development of the company brand with those people is foundational to relationship building.”

With people’s behavior shifting so heavily toward mobile technologies, it only makes sense that job recruiters should meet them there. For employers, mobile technology offers a few distinct benefits that websites and job search platforms can’t, primarily connectivity and elimination of geographic limitation.

“It allows for more time to have conversations with prospects,” Montero said. “Mobile technology ends up having a major impact on turnover, engagement and culture.”

Effective Tools

Mobile technology plugs in naturally with HR information systems and social media sites. This is notable, as the presentation uncovered, because around 60% of viewers felt that one of social media or HRIS was the most effective tool in recruitment.

One tool that is beginning to grab HR professionals attention is the Blue smart card, an e-business card of sorts created by Blue Social to streamline the ability of the user to direct job candidates or even consumers to the sites and content they wish. It works on near field communication (NFC) technology and doesn’t require an app to work with prospective candidates.

So how would this work? Imagine you’re doing recruiting at a job fair. You have a productive conversation with someone you think could be a prospect for a job within the company and want to share some information with them. When you pull out the card, you simply touch it to their phone and right then, they have access to the sites and documents you want to share.

“We call it the business card re-invented,” said Jose Montero Sr., Chief Operating Officer of Blue Social. “It allows users to share company information, social channels, specific job openings, application information and make custom prospect gathering forms available on mobile. Basically, any information that a recruiter needs can be gathered or shared by tapping the card on the prospects phone.”

Recruiters can customize the locations where they’re sending someone so that landing pages specific to an event pop up, for example, and can be linked to that specific prospect.

Blue also offers an auto networking feature, in which recruiters can use the technology to discover other people within the room and share their information that way, without the prospect even having to initiate an interaction. By using Bluetooth instead of GPS, the technology focuses on introducing recruiters and prospects based on proximity, usually within 150 feet.

Dashboards can then be created which serve as applicant tracking systems, complete with resumes and websites or social media profiles the candidate chooses to share. Recruiters can see analytics to determine how effective they are in identifying candidates so they can fine tune their approach and build a branded, streamlined process that fits the organization’s ideals and identity as well curating content that meets the expectations of someone in a specific role.

If you’ve outsourced your recruiting efforts, don’t worry, Blue Social can help there as well as you assess the effectiveness of the recruiting firm or tools you’re working with.

“You can track recruiter efficiency because you’ll know every time the recruiter shares the company information with candidates, but at the same time they’re encouraging the candidate to share back their information electronically using mobile technology, so it allows for increased quickness in interactions,” Christen Montero said.


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