Is Mobile Technology the New Frontier for Recruiting Employees?

Human resource staff, recruiters and other corporate pros who work on getting the best staff for an organization have got an obvious but untapped new tool to use: mobile technology.

Just a few months ago, mRecruitingcamp had a day-long national conference about this subject. The Sept. 30 program  was led by Michael Becker, managing director at the Mobile Marketing Association, according to a company statement.

In a recent interview, Michael Marlatt, founder of mRecruitingcamp, told The Business Insider that mobile “is one of the most untapped frontiers from a marketing and engagement perspective.”

“Mobile is that one piece of technology that connects the online and the offline world,” he said. It can make the application process much easier and user-friendly than having applicants filling out complex forms or uploading resumes and other documents.

“I think we're very quickly moving to where candidates will be very engaged via the social media landscape online that kind of blends the mobile,” Marlatt added. “So somebody can, for example… opt into a particular campaign with a company to learn about opportunities, they can get specific opportunities pushed out to them, but again they're opting into it, they can apply via the mobile device, it's seamless.”

Looking at the current recruitment process, companies are still “trying to understand how to properly implement and execute a mobile strategy,” he added.

“I think we can do a fairly good job today at getting people interested, attracting them, pulling them in,” Marlatt said. “Where we tend to not do so well right now is through the actual application process.”

In her report on mRecruting Camp, Chris Havrilla – a principal with Havrilla LLC – noted that some 77 percent of the world has a cell phone — “but only 20 percent of the Fortune 1000 has a mobile optimized site. …And 92 percent of career sites ignore the mobile channel all together. …Even less detect mobile access upfront and automatically redirect to a mobile rendered site.”

In a related matter on the sector, MobilityTechzone recently reported that SmartRecruiters created a mobile career website for each of its over 10,000 small business customers.