Want to communicate better with candidates or employees? Go SoMo

By Gary Berney, HireUp

We need to rethink communication with our audiences. If you’re in HR or Talent Acquisition that means looking again at how you engage both candidates and employees and to reassess where your audience is spending its time and the type of experience they require.

We’re at a stage where up to half your audience is either millennials or Generation Z. Millennials engage on a ‘mobile first’ basis, while Gen Z are ‘mobile only’. Even the older Generation X, the so called ‘mobile immigrants’, are using mobile to carry out many of their daily functions. According to research in 2018 the average adult spends 3 hours 35min per day on mobile devices, with 90% of that use via apps.
What does that mean for your engagement strategy? It means going SoMo (​So​cial & ​Mo​bile) and that requires a mobile first approach.Mobile first means developing content on social channels for mobile and then lastly thinking about how that might look on a desktop and that’s a huge change in thinking.

As we’ve seen, the stats would indicate that developing an app to help that engagement can make all the difference. As a recruiter if you’re still unsure if this approach is for you, our customers for example, using our employee referral app have seen a 55% increase in out of working hours engagement, leading to significant referral increases just by thinking more about where their audience, the employee, is spending their time.

By giving the audience the right experience, whenever and wherever they are, you are optimising your chances of successful engagement. Let’s think about your audience right now. Walk down any street and you’ll notice how many people are accessing content via their mobile phones. So it makes sense to be delivering a great experience to them via that media.

The harder part is providing the right experience. Candidates and colleagues alike are used to amazon, apple and google. To instant, smooth experiences so if you develop something a bit clunky then you run the risk repelling the exact audience you wish to attract. Carefully think through your engagement strategy, you need to go where your audience is. You need to go SoMo.