Winter 2014
Health Care Mobile Recruitment Trends and User Behavior Dave Tuttle, MS Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, AppVault
Over the past two years engaging candidates on mobile devices has become critically important. With over 40 percent of health care career site users arriving from mobile devices it’s safe to say that having a mobile optimized destination in 2014 is as important as having a traditional website was back in 2004. This article examines the reasons for this increase in mobile job search and explains how health care professionals are consuming mobile content when researching and applying for jobs. At AppVault, we’ve looked at the analytics and user behavior of dozens of our mobile clients in the health care space and have provided an analysis on the state of mobile health care recruitment. Why are health care candidates turning to mobile devices for job searches? This increase in job seeker behavior amongst these professionals can be attributed to several key factors: Improvements in Technology – As mobile devices become faster and mobile Internet speeds improve, performing process based tasks such as researching or applying to a job have become just as convenient on mobile as they are on a laptop. Consumer user behavior has eliminated the mobile learning curve and job seekers have come to expect the same user experience when applying to a job as they do when they make a purchase on Amazon. Additionally, as more career sites and applicant tracking systems are formatted for mobile, health care job seekers are coming to expect that hospitals and employers will offer a mobile optimized experience. Anonymity – Unlike many professionals, health care workers often use shared work spaces or terminals and have limited opportunity to anonymously search for jobs on desktop or laptop computers during working hours. As a result, nurses, therapists and allied health workers rely on the privacy and anonymity provided by mobile devices to conveniently search for jobs during peak working hours. As a result, formatting your career site for mobile can provide your organization with access to these candidates and give you a significant advantage over your talent competitors. Convenience and Personalization – Mobile devices are always with us and their use allows health care workers to research their career aspirations during the critical margins of their working day. Nurses and doctors are always on the go and the mobile Internet experience lends itself well to this lifestyle. Moreover, as health care workers have increasingly come to rely on mobile applications
for professional tasks, this preference for mobile convenience has carried over into their job search behavior and expectations. What kind of employment related activities are being performed by health care professionals on mobile devices? Job Search – The most important element to engaging health care professionals on mobile devices is ensuring that you provide them with an end to end mobile experience. This includes formatting all ATS requisitions for search and display on mobile devices. Similarly, you must provide multiple calls to actions, beyond the apply, that are formatted for mobile. This includes allowing candidates to share a job with their social network on Facebook and Twitter, email the job to themselves, or quickly opt in to a talent community. Simply taking the ATS experience and formatting it for mobile could cause you to miss out on a lot of passive and hard to find candidates. Research – Beyond just searching and applying to jobs, health care professionals rely on mobile devices to tell them about some of the intangible aspects of working for a hospital or health care facility. These include information about a company’s culture and commitment to diversity. Additionally, providing content related to charitable and green initiatives are attractive to mobile job seekers. As the employment outlook for health care has improved over the last several years candidates have become more discerning regarding vacations and benefits packages. Having this information formatted and displayed on your mobile career site is equally as important as the mobile optimization of the job search. Location Specific Information – It is important that your mobile optimized career site work with the strengths of mobile devices. One of the key strengths that the mobile job seeker experience provides is location specific information. If you are willing to relocate candidates, you need to not only state this in your mobile career site, but provide Google map integration so that candidates can measure their commute time or see local amenities that will help them evaluate if they are willing to move or extend a commute in order to work for you. Other considerations for mobile strategy: Email – Often overlooked in discussions of mobile recruitment, opening email is one of the primary activities that is performed on a mobile device. Any mobile engagement and recruitment strategy must include mobile optimized email communications. Email messaging must be brief
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