Tech - A Changing Talent Acquisition Model in a Mobile Web World
By Izzy Leizerowitz - Published in Mobile Marketer
The landscape of executive recruiting has evolved dramatically from the early days of telephone calls and faxed resumes. Harnessing the Internet has become mandatory to maintaining a competitive advantage in finding and acquiring talent that is increasingly in demand.
This article will focus on the next evolution in executive recruiting, one which may already be here, but will be in full force in 2009.
It is one that will be born from the convergence of the Internet and the mobile Web. The companies that will understand this paradigm will become industry leaders and innovators, and may in fact create the next killer app.
The result will be a new, ultimate talent search experience for candidates, clients and recruiters alike.
First a quick background on the today.
For both the candidates seeking employment and the firms seeking the candidates, the Internet has created a rich, interactive talent acquisition environment filled with sophisticated corporate career Web sites, highly customized job boards, heavily visited social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace, growing popularity of blogs catering to all facets of the job search, and finally focused target mobile marketing services, able to reach every participant in the process.
The result is that the talent acquisition experience today already provides everyone in the process access to detailed job and candidate information.
So then what's the entire buzz about using the mobile Web to further evolve the talent search process? Let's take a look.
First, basically everyone has a mobile phone or PDA. According to Plunkett Research Ltd., there were more than 3 billion global cellular telephone subscribers by mid-2008, including more than 260 million in the United States alone.
New mobile phones and PDAs are likely to be Internet-capable, and increasingly able to take advantage of 3G high speed access. In fact, there are hundreds of millions of consumers accessing the Internet via some type of wireless access worldwide.
No matter the exact statistical source, there are three times more mobile phones than computers in the world. Consumers use their mobile phones and PDAs at least 15-plus hours per day, on average.
Second, mobile phones and PDAs incorporate exclusively unique characteristics.
As mobile services platform provider Nellymoser defined as essential to its model of Mobile 2.0, mobile devices are unique because they are very personal, local, always on and ever-present.
Mobile device manufacturers, carriers, service providers and related vendors are constantly offering new products and methods to improve sending and receiving video, texting, talking, recording and capturing data and content.
So now because we have a scenario where essentially everyone has a mobile device, many of these users connect to the Internet, and most users have some sending or receiving texting function, we have an ability to deliver an executive recruiting experience significantly faster, more personal and more detailed than the current process.
The evolution is already in progress.
Anil Jaising of Ekobuzz is already developing value on several fronts.
Ekobuzz is working with recruiting firms on marketing campaigns to improve the recruiting process and enhance customer service.
Using SMS and short code, recruiting firms can plan to keep on top of the entire interview process between an employer and a number of candidates.
For potential candidates the recruiter will use mobile technology to send interview schedules, briefly write up job descriptions, maintain employer contact information, and get directions to make sure the candidate has everything in the palm of his or her hand before going to the interview and is very well prepared.
Using common short codes the recruiter is able to provide the ability for the candidate to respond to his messages, confirm the interview and send a message if he gets delayed.
Recruiters can send out SMS messages to potential employers with brief skill sets of the candidates, confirm interview schedules and location and using short codes to receive quick feedback about his candidate's performance, thus saving valuable time and money for both his clients and his staff.
On a carrier level, search engines are ramping up their mobile products and distribution channels to reach as many personal device users as possible. The result is a more device-friendly, focused Web search experience.
Mariano Zadeh, head of business development of mobile at Yahoo, said, "The focus is really to grow and distribute our search engine product to the mobile customer base through strategic distribution partners, to expand our reach so that every user using their mobile device can access our One Search platform and increase our reach. We will be the default Web page on their personal device."
In the past year, Mariano's efforts have secured additional access to over 140 million new personal device users through carrier agreements.
Identifying and reaching the right candidates for a given job search requires strong analytics and process.
Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring Technologies, understands the model.
"As the ComScore No. 1-ranked provider of widget distribution and social sharing tools, Clearspring is actively contributing to the transformation of the recruiting process," he said.
"Empowered with Clearspring's tools, recruiters and career services can now extend their reach with measureable word-of-mouth campaigns, as well as create one-to-one dialogs with potential hires."
Social networking sites will continue to play a vital role in both an active and passive capacity to connect people to jobs.
By creating the ability to continuously track candidates and opportunities through the social network medium, the best jobs and candidates will be communicated to in a targeted, active manner.
The mobile world is catching up on this front as well, and it's not just a mobile phone or iPhone phenomenon.
According to Dan Bucher, writing in Mobile Marketer, "The MySpace for BlackBerry application has exceeded 1 million downloads in one month. The application launched in November and set a record with 400,000 downloads in the first week. This represented an all-time high for both MySpace and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion for first-week application downloads. --
Facilitating a great match between candidate and job search will mean maintaining valued connectivity with all targeted users across all mediums and devices.
As exciting as the talent search experience has become in the age of the Internet, the horizon is simply endless for deploying services, platforms and technologies to mobile device users.
The talent search experience will shortly become one of instantaneous opportunity, availability and communication for all concerned.
Communication will take place through texting and instant messaging, video mail, email and, of course, telephone calling. You will be able to connect to get information on candidates, companies and recruiters in real time and make informed decisions quickly.
Users will receive focused information on targeted opportunities and searches. That time is almost here.