Thu, 19 Apr 2012

Should recruiters invest in a mobile application to promote recruitment drives or is the money better spent on a mobile-optimised site?

That’s “completely the wrong debate” to have, social recruiting expert Matt Alder argued this week at a breakfast discussion about the future of recruitment in London.

“Having a mobile-optimised site is incredibly important,” Alder told the recruitment community audience at the Wednesday morning event. While mobile apps can offer “bells and whistles” attraction elements, mobile-optimised sites improve the user experience of basic essentials of site usage and navigation. For instance, Alder pointed out, most job notifications sent by email are read on mobile phones.

At energy provider RWE npower, the recruitment division’s careers site has been successfully mobile-optimised, said Adam Templeman, the company’s head of resourcing. The optimisation has been so successful that even the company’s consumer marketing team has sought advice from the HR-resourcing operation on how to do the same with their own site, Templeman said.

The event was hosted by web services firm 4MAT and chaired by Jeff Grout.