TL/DR There are lots of free tools available to ensure the health and usability of your mobile careers site and two of my favourites are the Mobile Friendly Test provided by Google, and the amazing visualisation and diagnostic tool provided by MobiReady.
If you found this article, I’m very sure you’ve grown tired of hearing statistics like “85% of candidates are using a Smartphone to start searching for jobs”
You would need to be an utter Fopdoodle to have ignored the fact that you need a mobile career site to even participate in the battle to attract and recruit the best talent, especially here in Asia Pacific.
What do you notice when you scan this data on mobile and internet use in the markets in South East Asia?
Mobile is overwhelming Desktop internet in this region. Go mobile, or go home. If you don’t have a mobile recruiting site, you have a weak recruiting model.
So maybe you’ve stayed relevant. You’ve made a convincing business case for a mobile career site and engaged a 3rd party to create one for you, or even tried to build something in-house.
It may look shiny. It may be even be delivering an increase in applications via mobile. But is your mobile career site the best it can be?
You don’t need to be a tech guru to run some simple tests to make sure your mobile career site is in rude health and working optimally. Here are a few tips you can try out to work out if your mobile website is as good under the hood, as it is on the surface.
Friend, or Foe? Thanks Google!
Google have kindly provided a way to test a mobile career site. All you need to do is visit this website, copy/paste your career site URL and you get instant feedback.
For fun, I used the site to understand the mobile friendliness of some companies operating in the ride-hailing / transportation app space. Here’s what I learned.
If you want to test basic level mobile friendliness for your site, or any other site, all you need to do is go to this link.
As well as giving you a baseline on how friendly your site is, you also get info on all of the invisible stuff companies are using to track and store your online data.
For instance, on the career site of a large well-funded transportation app [cough], I learned that there are 13 different ways they try to track you, including a "behavioural data bank" from Adobe's creepy-sounding Demdex.
There are even handy tips on how to correct some site issues you may discover, such as the content being too wide for the screen, or having too many clickable elements.
Now that you’ve tested your mobile site at a basic level, are you ready for something more advanced?
Mobiready is an awesome site owners and buyers of career sites to test what they’ve bought.
One of the fancy things it does, is provide a visualisation like the one below, which allows you to simulate how your mobile career site looks across different devices, including lower tier phones
This site needs work. Does yours?
The magic really happens on Mobiready when it shows you a list of all the things that might be wrong with the site, in order of importance and impact.
This would include major fails that impact site usability and performance, such as:
Your images are too large.
Your DOM count is too high.
You’re using iFrames or Tables.
There are no eTags.
You’re using inline Javascript.
Your CSS is not compliant.
This might not mean much to you, but MobiReady allows you to instantly email the report to your site developers and designers. It also provides pictures of the specific code with errors or problems.
This returns the power to you, because suddenly, you understand, and can describe what needs fixing on your mobile site to create a great candidate experience.
The site even links to explanations of fixes. So no excuses from any shady digital agencies or site providers.
Did I mention this site is free to use? God bless the internets. Now you can quickly and simply diagnose and fix your mobile careers site, deliver a better candidate experience, and suddenly improve the lives of your site visitors.