Welcome

Piggybacking on my panel discussion, "Leveraging Mobile as a Supplement to Recruiting" at the Onrec Expo, I wanted to share several tips to help you get started in the mobile space, as well as give you plenty of resources to work with.

Over the past year I have gone from 0-60 miles per hour with my mobile adoption, not only for recruiting, but for also marketing myself and my businesses (General Lead & RecruitChute). I mobilized this website with Everywhereigo, set-up QR (2D bar code) campaigns with ScanLife, and ran several text campaigns with TextMarks.



From my experiences, here are some starter tips for getting into mobile recruiting:

1) Get familiar with the mobile scene. A good start on this front would be to research the terms SMS, MMS, short codes and QR codes via Wikipedia. These three have become synonymous with mobile technologies. Another good outlet for "mobile" information is CloudRecruiting.net. Continue by reading up on industry leading blogs such as Mobile Marketer, Mobile Marketing Watch, Mobile Marketing Profits, IntoMobile, Communities Dominate Brands and mTrends. In addition, check out these four books: The Mobile Marketing Handbook, Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market, Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology, and Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media. Finally, don't forget to stop by the Mobile Marketing Association which has a wealth of resources to soak up.

2) Decide your mobile recruiting goals. Decide who you are trying to market to first: active or passive job seekers, new clients for your business or someone else altogether. What is the outcome you are looking for? Are you trying to get job seekers to apply to your open positions? Are you building a stable of active and passive job seekers in certain fields? Are you trying to get more brand awareness in your space? Retain employees? There is an endless amount of creative ways to utilize mobile campaigns to your advantage. In my case, I use mobile campaigns to both drive more traffic to my open positions online (and ultimately get more applications/submissions), as well as get more brand awareness for my company and myself. I accomplish this not with one campaign as a catch-all for everything, but by breaking my goals into several campaigns and trying to reach that audience accordingly. 

3) Get your websites mobilized. I think the most important thing you or your company needs to consider when entering the mobile space is mobilizing your website, blog and career sites. Without a mobile presence, I wouldn't jump into any type of campaigns at all. Most saavy people, whether they are job candidates or potential leads for your business, will check your website through their mobile web browser. If your site is not mobilized, they will probably find it very difficult to navigate on such a small screen. Ultimately users will get frustrated in the first few seconds of entering your site, and walk away with a negative impression of your business. I used Everywhereigo to mobilize this website because it offered great features such as the ability to hook up my Twitter feed, and had great customization options. Other options to consider are MoFuse, MOBIFY, Winksite, UBIK and Movylo. Also check out mobiForge, the world's largest independent mobile development community. A quick point to consider: most of these sites offer free and fee versions of their services. In most cases, you pay for what you get. The free versions are usually very lightweight with no frills and very little options to work with. They barely offer you what you need. I'd strongly urge you to consider a fee version that can work for you and your budget.

4) Build "opt-in" mobile marketing lists. You have to treat marketing in the mobile space much differently than other forms of marketing, such as email marketing. You must get people to "opt-in" to your marketing efforts, whether it be SMS, MMS or any other form. If you decide to send out marketing messages at random without permission, you run the risk of negative perceptions of you and your company, there could also be heavy fines associated with it, and even suspension or banishment from wireless carriers. This list won't grow easily, and it won't grow overnight either, so you must have patience. Over the past year, I have built several respectable sized opt-in lists to market to. I accomplished this in several key ways: making job seekers aware of my mobile programs, placing information about my mobile campaigns with links in each job posting online, using my social and business networks (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc), working my mobile campaign information into my blog, and offering free content online (such as whitepapers, webinars and presentations) related to mobile recruiting. Another simple, yet effective strategy is to place information inside your email signature. Integrate your mobile efforts into everything you do if you want to be successful. A great example of mobile recruiting success is AT&T. One way AT&T built their mobile marketing list, was integrating with their ATS, Taleo. So, every time a candidate filled out a job application online in Taleo, they would be given the option to subscribe to mobile alerts for programs and job openings. They had over 105,000+ mobile subscribers as of last week! Check out this mobile recruiting presentation from Chris Hoyt (aka RecruiterGuy) who works in Talent Acquisition for AT&T.



5) Plug 'n play with mobile campaigns. Get a survey of different services and solutions that are available for your marketing efforts. Discover what can help you accomplish your goals and what will work into your budget. This will include services and solutions for text messages, voice, mobile web promotion, social networking and proximity marketing. Two services I use for conducting mobile marketing campaigns are TextMarks and ScanLife. I run a business with a small budget set aside for marketing, including mobile efforts. Finding solutions to market effectively in the mobile space on the cheap was important to me. TextMarks offers both fee and free options for sending text messages to your opt-in lists. The free version was limited (only giving 120 out of the possible 160 characters to text with due to TextMarks advertisements). I upgraded to one of their fee plans, which was a minimal investment, and offers all 160 characters to work with and no advertisements. It was crucial getting those extra 40 characters to work with. ScanLife is a service offering 2D and 3D bar codes you create and use anywhere, including websites, email signatures, business cards and more. Using 2D bar codes has offered a more interactive way to engage my audience, as they have to use their cell phones (camera phones specifically) to get the message. While not as widely adopted as text campaigns, 2D bar codes offer a very creative way to reach your audience. Other services and solutions to consider are: Mobivity, mobileStorm, Joopz, QRapp, Jumptap, ipsh! and Punchkick Interactive.     

On a final note, here is a great 90-second video clip on TAT Augmented ID that shows the not too distant future of virtual networking and also gives great insight into the possibilities for mobile recruiting (original video can be found here): 



[ This post entitled My Mobile Recruiting Starter Guide originated by the blog of social media consultant and recruiting leader Geoff Peterson. ]