Mobile Talent




To try out a basic mobile demo site view this URL on a smartphone: http://inntrack-brochure.snaphire.com/m 

There's widespread agreement that mobile engagement on all kinds of web sites is increasing very rapidly. Many of SnapHire's customers are already seeing mobile (smartphone) job seekers making up 15% or more of their overall traffic, and the trends are strongly upwards.

If you are seeing a combination of a large number of job seekers visiting your site using mobile, and a high bounce rate (where the job seekers leave the site immediately after arriving), then you can be fairly sure that you are effectively turning away a number of potential candidates.

To help you meet the needs of your mobile job seekers, SnapHire has announced SnapHire Mobile, and the SnapHire Mobile express branding offer.

What is SnapHire Mobile?

SnapHire Mobile is a hosting platform specifically for mobile careers sites. SnapHire Mobile is provided as an upgrade to SnapHire Studio, the same hosting platform that powers your regular SnapHire careers site.

SnapHire Mobile allows you to create sophisticated mobile-optimised sites with all of the features and branding elements that your mobile job seekers expect - sites that look great, load quickly, and work beautifully on all modern smartphones.

SnapHire Mobile also integrates seamlessly with your main careers site. That means that your mobile site can share all of your employment branding data, from your jobs and categories (like your locations) right through to testimonials, departments and all of your other digital assets that you use on your regular site.

This integration also means that your job seekers get a single, consolidated user experience, regardless of what device they access your site with. For example, a job seeker can visit your site on their iphone, email an interesting job directly from their phone, and then apply for it on their desktop PC later.

What is express branding?

Building any careers site - including a mobile-friendly one - can become a bit of an open-ended exercise. SnapHire Mobile express branding is an offer from SnapHire that removes the risk of developing an entirely new site. We've created templates for common mobile careers sites, which means we're not starting from scratch when we build your site, but instead, we're leveraging proven designs that work well on mobile.

This doesn't mean you can't control the look and feel of the site, it just gives you a low-cost way to get a great mobile site at a fixed cost.

Express branding gives you a mobile site that:

  • fully reflects your own employment branding in a fast-loading, mobile-friendly format
  • is designed form the ground up for mobile, with large, touch-friendly controls and easy navigation
  • supports real-time redirection, so that job seekers are always directed to the right site for the deive they are using at the time
  • provides practical, usable ways for job seekers to email jobs to themselves to apply later on from their main computer

What is mobile?

People talk a lot about mobile, but often they mean different things. To some people, mobile means cell phones of any kind, tablets (e.g., ipad), "phablets", and even netbooks. When we talk about a "mobile careers site", we are really talking about a site that works well on a "modern smartphone" - e.g., an iphone, Android phone, or Windows phone device.

Smartphones are different from other modern web browsing devices (like ipads) because they:

  • are always available (carried in the pocket most of the time)
  • are always online (they have 3G or other fast internet access)
  • need special web design because their screens are so small

What about older phones?

When it comes to phones, mobile web browsers have been around for a long time.

You may have seen older Nokia phones that proudly sported a web browser, which you could use to visit some (not all) web sites, where you would enjoy an excrutiatingly slow (and ugly) user experience. Some people created special web sites using a special dialect of HTML (the code your careers site is built on) called WML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language).

These old phones, and WML itself, are quickly becoming extinct, and it is most likely not worth putting in any special effort to support these old mobile browsers.

Modern smartphones by comparison all have state of the art, modern, standards compliant browsers. Even though the phones themselves are quite different, it is actually easier to build web sites that work well and look good across a very wide range of modern smartphones.

How does it work?

Although a separate site, your mobile site has access to all of the same information held in SnapHire - including your jobs, categories (locations, expertise, etc.) and your digital assets (testimonials, departments, etc.).

This sharing of key data between main and mobile sites means that both sites are always up to date. Close a job and it will disappear from the main site and the mobile site instantly. Add a testimonial and it will appear on both sites, in just the right places.

And just like your main site, once built, your mobile site can be kept updated without any need for ongoing web development.

Do I really need a separate mobile site from my main careers site?

The short answer today is "probably yes".

In theory, using new techniques like responsive design, its possible to make a careers site that works for both mobile and desktop users. See http://paulrobertlloyd.com/2012/05/kiwibank for an example.

However rebuilding your entire careers site using responsive design is likely to be a big job. Also, responsive design gets harder the smaller the target device gets. So while its definitely a good idea to build your main careers site using an responsive approach, so that it scales well across desktops, tablets and other larger format devices, its a lot harder to get that same design to work right down to the very small screen size of an iphone or other smartphone.

Depending on how well your existing site works on modern devices (for example, if your site relies heavily on Flash, it really needs to be re-designed anyway, so that it even displays on Apple devices), adding a separate mobile site to your existing "large format" site is normally a more cost-effective approach than trying to build one site that caters for all devices.

Will people apply online using mobile?

No, although this is a rapidly changing area that SnapHire is committed to leading in. Today, it is difficult to apply for a job on a mobile device. Even uploading a CV is difficult or impossible on some platforms from a web site. Practically speaking, the mobile platform today is best suited to driving engagement, so that committed candidates can return and complete the application process on their desktop computer later.

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