News briefs: Mobile recruiting interfaces still painful
The pace of HR's mobile app implementation is very slow. Upgrading HR's tech is not the biggest priority in the business. An alternative may be a recruiting site with ATS features.
Mobile recruiting platforms aren't getting enough attention from HR departments, according to a recent Glassdoor report. Mobile interfaces are clunky and hard to use. They impose required fields that duplicate data that's already on the résumé.
"Mobile job application experiences remain painful for most job seekers," said Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor's chief economist, in a report on upcoming trends. This is a problem for employers. Many job seekers today are using mobile devices to reach employer job sites.
It is a consequence of legacy enterprise applicant tracking systems (ATSes) built before the mobile era. Firms are waking up to this fact, and Glassdoor believes improving mobile recruiting systems is on the verge of becoming a priority.
A lot of organizations have a hodgepodge of HR systems. Their primary goal is moving to cloud and to mobile more quickly, said Tony DiRomualdo, senior director of the HR executive advisory program at The Hackett Group, based in Miami.
But mobile is only "widely implemented" in 16% of organizations surveyed last fall by Hackett. DiRomualdo said he believes the percentage is higher for mobile recruiting platforms, because it's easier to make a business case.
Mobile recruiting implementation "has been slower than a lot of people in HR would like," DiRomualdo said. "They have a hard time getting the funding and prioritization for it," he said.
A new recruiting platform with ATS-like systems
Mobile job application experiences remain painful for most job seekers.
Andrew Chamberlainchief economist, Glassdoor
Recruiting platform vendors are taking on some of the work of internal applicant tracking systems and can give job seekers a better mobile experience. They are creating dashboards and intelligent ranking systems. JobzMall, the latest addition to this trend, is due to launch Jan. 15.
The site, which has about 250 participating organizations and is running in a closed beta, organizes itself around a "virtual shopping mall," said Nathan Candaner, co-founder of JobzMall, based in Irvine, Calif.
Employers have virtual stores and can use video to create a personalized experience about their business. There are different buildings -- such as the startup building, one for nonprofits, another for freelancers and one for larger firms. Job seekers fill out a template on the recruiting platform, which they can use to apply for multiple jobs. The system gives applicants a little more transparency into the progress of their application.
Candaner said he sees a need for this type of recruiting platform. Many job sites today want users to cut and paste their résumés for each job application. The systems give employers little help in managing the applications.
JobzMall gives employers a dashboard, which includes collaborative tools, for managing and viewing applicants in one spot. The system knows what the qualifications are and the skill sets of the applicants. It also learns the employer's behavior in evaluating candidates. It uses that to help rank and select applicants. "Our system learns, and in time, we do give very pointed candidates to required jobs," Candaner said.
