How to Create a Mobile-Ready Job Application Process

As you can read in my article How many candidates apply for jobs using their mobiles? there will be over 50% of job applications on mobile devices at the end of 2020. How to achieve this might push you to switch ATS, invest many hours of IT-consultants or change internal routines.

This guide will teach you about 5 crucial factors to secure a good mobile-ready job application process.

All of which takes time to realize. So it is time to start thinking about how well your job application process is suited for mobile job applications. This is a necessity in order to have a candidate experience that converts visitors to candidates and candidates to promoters.

Plus, you do not want to spend money to market your job ads, improve your employer brand and all those efforts you do drive potential employees to your job ad. Just to find out that they do not convert (since applying on mobile is not possible). That is not money well spent.

Here are our 5 tips on what to do to secure that you are having a mobile-ready job application process:

Step 1: Ask yourself, what do you think is key for a mobile-ready job application process?

In order to apply for a job on a mobile device, what do you think is important? CV, yes/no? Apply with LinkedIn? Responsive website?

This first step is important. Don’t be shy here. In a dream world, what would be your best version of applying for a job on mobile?

By first thinking about your own expectations, this will help you to find the right solution no matter what path you will choose to get a better mobile-ready job application process.

Step 2: Apply for one of your own jobs

Apply for one of your own jobs just to learn how your process to apply for a job looks like. And, of course, compare this to your list of what you think is important for a mobile-ready job application process that you created in step 1.

How well do your expectations match your job application process? By now you know what you are looking for to create.

Step 3: Start collecting your metrics

Do you already know how many candidates apply using mobile devices? If not, you will need to start collecting this metric and you need to start before you conduct changes. We want to know that our changes actually improve the mobile readiness of our job application process and therefore also improves our candidate experience.

If you do not collect these metrics today I would suggest three ways to collect this:

1. Does our ATS provide this metric?
2. Does our ATS provide the option to ask the candidates?
3. Do we have support for this in google analytics?

Step 4: Apply changes to get a mobile-friendly job application process

After step 1 and 2 you got a list of what you want from your mobile-ready application process. Now it is time to start implementing these changes. Hint: repeat step 2 and apply for one of your own jobs after you have launched changes. Ask yourself: Did this turn out as I thought it would?

Step 5: Follow up on metrics from step 3

Once changes are applied, follow up so that e.g the number of mobile job applications didn’t drop when you launched the changes(yes, not every change is for the positive).

If the change was successful keep this as a part of your job application process.

If this change was not successful then learn from this change and either remove or redesign. If you redesigned then do not forget to follow up on the new metrics again (yes, redesigned changes can also turn out to not be improvements).

Conclusion

The 2 keys in this step by step guide – How to create a mobile-ready job application process, is to understand that the changes you make, can be positive or negative. To understand this you need to work with metrics and data in order to find out what changes are positive (what we want to keep). But also what changes are negative (what we do not want to keep).

So with the power of metrics and data, you will change your candidate experience and improve the application phase of your recruitment process and therefore also improve your candidate experience.

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Interested in constant updates and to discuss more with me, Simon. Add me on LinkedIn and I am happy to talk more.