Social media was the next big thing in communication three years ago; now, that title belongs to mobile media. More and more, people—especially teens and young adults—are accessing the internet on mobile devices.
Not only that, they’re using those devices to consume entertainment (watching TV on their phone, for instance), and texting is still huge, with 72% of Americans texting at least occasionally, and regular texters sending an average of 41.5 texts a day.
In many candidate pools, computers are not part of daily life; this is especially true for industrial and hospitality candidates. However, mobile devices are proving to be a great substitute for computers in terms of web browsing, plus, they have the communications capabilities of calling and texting.
So how can you use mobile media to help with staffing and recruiting?
Make your website mobile-friendly. Keep your layout simple and easy to view in one column. Don’t let your text get too small, and if you have links or buttons, make sure they’re long enough or large enough to be clicked with a finger.
Use social media regularly. Most mobile devices are extremely well-integrated with social media; some even have platform-specific functions or buttons built in. Facebook alone had 50 million mobile users in the U.S. last year.
Make the most of texting. Many job candidates screen calls, so the process of calling, waiting through the rings, listening to the message and then leaving one of your own is not only time-consuming, it’s often pointless. Instead, you can text your clients (who will check their texts because it’s a one-way communication with no obligation of reply) with information about a job, then have the ones who are interested call you.
Texting is a fantastic savings of time and effort. If you need to supply, say, 25 banquet servers for a job, and you’ve found that you have to call 8 people to find one person who’s interested and available, you’d have to call 200 people.
At a conservative estimate of 20 seconds to find a number, 4 seconds to dial, 4 seconds of rings, 3 seconds of outgoing message and 9 seconds of your message, that’s 40 seconds a call, that’s 133 minutes, or almost 2 hours and a quarter spent on the phones—and that assumes you’re doing nothing else that whole time.
How long does it take to reach those same 200 people by text? At a generous estimate of 10 minutes to select the candidates you want individually, 3 minutes to type the message and 2 minutes to click the various buttons in COATS and then in Outlook… 15 minutes. Then, you can sit back and let the interested applicants contact you.
If that sounds like a great use of mobile media, we agree! We’ve got a whole eBook on the subject, in fact; you can click here to download it.
What other uses of mobile media have you found? Let us know in the comments!