8 Coolest Smartphone Recruiting Apps to Kickstart 2013

By Sanjay Joshi
21/12/2012

The onset of online recruitment globally about 10 years ago followed by the social recruiting trend introduced a new set of low-cost and faster recruitment practices. The foreseeable and logical progression to mobile recruiting in recent times has not changed much except moving the recruiting opportunities and resources to the portable and nifty medium of mobile communication. Thus, online job boards and social recruitment have given way to mobile selection, mobile games recruiting, mobile interviewing and mobile employer branding campaigns.

The recent evolution of mobile recruitment has led to the new corporate priority of a mobile-friendly career presence online. This obviously entails necessary efforts to optimize career sites as well as job postings for the mobile device. Those companies that adapt early to the realities of mobile recruiting stand to gain an edge over the competition in terms of engaging job-seekers.

Potentialpark in its recent Online Talent Communication (OTaC) study surveyed more than 30,000 jobseekers globally to understand their attitude towards mobile recruiting activities. Upon being questioned about the most appealing mobile recruiting activities, 57% candidates cited job search and 51% mentioned job alerts respectively while 58% extolled location independence as a prime benefit. However, the below graphic illustrates well a range of activities explored by job-seekers on their mobiles:

Further, as part of the OTaC study, an audit involving 350 top global employers revealed that only three percent had a career app for mobiles while only seven percent a mobile-friendly website.

Jana, the Boston-based world’s largest mobile rewards platform with footprints in over 102 countries, through a very insightful infographic ‘Engaging with the Next Billion’ illustrates that emerging markets like India, China and Mexico have a basic mobile phone penetration rate in the range of 75-85%, close behind Brazil, Vietnam and Columbia, which boast a 100% penetration rate. In addition to text messaging being a highly potential building block of recruitment related messaging, the slow but steady early stage penetration of smartphones in India (a very low 4 percent currently) is sure to unleash a string of strong recruitment opportunities online.

Leading social recruiting expert Jacco Valkenburg illustrates the quickly growing mobile internet usage in India that amazingly exceeded desktop overall internet usage in the month of May 2012.

Questions to Explore

Recruiting agencies and corporate recruiters alike seem poised and sensitive to the merits of adopting mobile as a feasible tactic for hiring top talent. However, not many employers in U.S., Europe and Asia have embraced mobile recruiting strategies either through mobile career websites or various apps.

One of the first challenges of mobile recruiting relate to the knowledge gap that subsists between the recruiters and those with the skills to create and deploy mobile recruiting tools. This, inevitably, confronts the companies with a further dilemma of choosing the right kind of mobile recruiting solution: a mobile version of a corporate website (mSite) or a career app downloadable for a mobile device. To fulfill imminent recruiting needs, most companies consider it valuable to optimize their existing website for mobile browsers as an interims solution.

Some of the other questions that remain while offering the mobility option to candidates include: How long can companies offer various kinds of mobile recruiting apps free of charge? Does the idea of providing various apps facilitate a reciprocally useful versus one-way relationship? With the prospective candidates applying to numerous positions in various organizations, in how many career apps, pages and communities can we expect various organizations to invest time in?

Though mobile recruiting trend is yet to come of age, still the markets are flooded with a vast number of mobile apps. This is a good time to outline the top 8 mobile applications which can help HR professionals navigate the hiring challenges in 2013.

1) Bullhorn

Designed as an efficient mobile-based applicant tracking software, it is available across Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows platforms.  To set it apart from conventional job search apps, Bullhorn has unique CRM elements to look up and evaluate highly qualified candidates, modify user interfaces, and even find candidates with similar skills and experience quickly.

2) Fish4Jobs

Fish4Jobs has the distinction of being the first ever job site to release a mobile app for job-seekers using Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone or Android smartphones. This simple and smart job board app not just makes it easier for candidates to hunt and apply for jobs using LinkedIn or Fish4Jobs profiles but also offers job alerts and a cool salary calculator.  Besides, candidates can easily access their cover letters, resumes and job applications. This app is constantly updated basis feedback generated from a strong community of around 1.8 million registered users.

3) HireVue

This is an iPhone app that has reinvented the process of remote job interviews by offering a video-based job interview and hiring management platform. With HireVue, recruiters can create interview questions, mail them to prospective employees and be assured that candidates only get one chance to record their answers via webcam. Recruiters can even share the video graphed interviews with other members of the hiring team.

4) Jobscience

This is an iPhone recruiting application that uses the Force.com platform and offers robust applicant tracking capabilities (application to placement) on the smartphone. Jobscience gives recruiters the ability to quickly set up open positions, upload resumes in bulk, search candidates from Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook and manage candidate communication using pre-built email templates.

5) Jobsite Jobs

Jobsite Jobs is a free and innovative smartphone app from Jobsite.co.uk. It allows prospective candidates to hunt around 40,000 jobs by location, job title, date, salary etc. and save the opportunity or apply using their resume uploaded on Jobsite.

6) JobSpeek

Available for free, JobSpeek is a smartphone job posting application that allows corporate recruiters to add their company’s picture along with a sixty second audio hiring message as a unique sourcing practice.

7) The Hire Syndicate

This is a lifesaver smartphone app that helps recruiters to manage a full-bodied network of recruiters and job-seekers efficiently, quickly and privately. Recruiters can now share potential candidates and jobs within their networks in real-time from anywhere and work smarter.

8) Google Power Search

This utility app from Google gives you a powerful way to mine all sorts of recruitment related information (candidates, postings) from the web using Google.  With its easy-to-use interface, recruiters can now find everything relevant about prospective candidates without struggling with complex search strings.

The new wave of smartphone recruiting apps is clearly transforming the HR recruiting landscape. With the advent of new mobile technologies and recruiting apps emerging in various forms, it is time for recruiters to adapt and hop onto the bandwagon of mobile recruiting before it is too late.

Sanjay Joshi is an Editor at SHRM India.