About a week ago I attended the 2nd Annual Mobile Recruiting Conference that was held in Atlanta. The first one was held in Silicon Valley and you can review the mRecrutingcamp 2012 agenda on this slide share that Michael Marlatt, the organizer provided to those of us that attended.

If you are not familiar with mobile recruiting I hope this brief introduction will provide you with enough knowledge for you to embark on a mobile recruiting strategy for your organization. The future is now..no longer is the question should we have a mobile recruiting strategy, the question is WHEN should we implement it?

Overall – “Mobile has become the fastest growing industry over the past thirty years. Media consumption habits have shifted towards mobile as consumers feed their need to be hyper-connected and on the go.” –Michael Marlatt

The conference – This conference specifically focuses on exploring the impact of mobile innovation in the recruitment industry. Companies such as PepsiCo and UPS have recently embarked on adding a mobile recruiting strategy to their overall recruiting strategy. It was interesting to hear the heads of recruiting discuss some of the challenges, such as getting people to complete a full application via their mobile phone and satisfying all those EEOC rules the U.S. has to comply with. Both of these organizations partnered with Jibe to help them integrate their applicant tracking systems and provide the user with an easy to navigate mobile recruiting site. (You can find out more about how Jibe is shaking up traditional recruiting by signing up for the white paper.)

Both of these large companies had best practices to share. PepsiCo implemented various ways to upload your resume into their mobile system.  Upload your stored resume via DropBox or upload your resume content from FaceBook or LinkedIn. The PepsiCo representative did note that all levels of applicants hit their site and apply. There was some skepticism among the executive team that drivers would access the site. Guess what, they did and at all hours of the day.

For the record UPS had over 2,800 applicants hit their mobile site and apply the first week it was live. The applicants included professional levels as well as hourly workers. If you were still questioning to this point if you should have a mobile recruiting strategy, perhaps that number alone will have you rethinking that’s its just a fad. Mobile recruiting is here to stay. Potential applicants are coming to your career site every day from their mobile phone and becoming frustrated because your career site is not optimized for mobile. By the way, these same people are also potential customers. Somehow I don’ t think you are intentionally trying to irritate customers.

More cool stuff – So if you thought just having a mobile career site would bring potential applicants your way, you are going to want to take a look at how Pongr  ensures your mobile site will engage customers from an overall marketing perspective. Pongr uses photo behavior for marketing purposes. It enables your customers to engage with your brand and express themselves through photos. This way YOUR customers become your BRAND ambassadors. As the Pongr CEO put it, you are not trying to create new behaviors in people, but leverage their current behaviors. Basically, go fish for customers where the fish are.  It’s cool stuff and if you are a company that has a product, I highly recommend you high tail it over to the Pongr site and see how you can use this technology to infuse some coolness into your brand.

There is a lot more to report but this post is getting way too long. I’ll end this here and come back with part deux and share some more great insights from the world of mobile recruiting.