Applying for Jobs on Mobiles | What Employers Need to Know
Mobiles are the most used device when applying for jobs. Phones used to just make calls, then, became a portable Internet device with a camera. Now you can do pretty much do anything you could only previously do on your Computer, only with the convenience of fitting in a pocket too. Nearly 75% of adults (18+) now own a smartphone, influencing job boards, recruiter websites and other applications to be mobile friendly and stand out from the competition.
Applications for jobs through smartphone are now higher than on PC
Applying for jobs on mobile devices is common for all age groups although there is a stronger trend in the most recent generation so it’s crucial that you optimize your job listing and even your website for mobiles. Mobiles dominate the majority of job searches, especially from tech-savvy applicants. There is still evidence that shows Legal, Financial, Engineering and Mathematical jobs tend to be applied via a PC however.
80% of job searches in the UK originate from mobile devices and most job links are first viewed via mobile. (we don’t all walk around with our PC after all) so these statistics make sense. Even in most other countries, nearly half of people apply via mobile.
It’s a simple conclusion; Optimize your job and website for mobile-friendly use, or you’ll miss out on great talent.
Find The best Technical Staff using Empathic Recruitment ℠
Companies are always looking for technical staff. Whether its software coders, engineers, data scientists, and web designers. It’s hard to find people with strong tech skills, and who also fits your business culture. Most hiring managers and recruiters found it challenging finding workers with tech skills as it is. To find someone who also has the personality and social competence for that particular team a challenge.
How an empathic approach works:
Having a lack of tech talent in your business can damage revenue without you knowing, and will always slow down development. Coders, software engineers, data scientists, and web designers are more needed in this “tech-bubble-society” than ever.
The technology field is broad and every company works differently, so finding an absolutely perfect match is unlikely. However, finding someone with the majority of skills but with strong social capabilities isn’t. Having a team fit leads to new recruits quickly inheriting the skills necessary from their colleagues.
Empathic Recruitment ℠ uses video recruitment software to gain information needed to make informed hiring decisions, gathering information on personality traits, work ethic and social suitability compared to paper-based data processing, allowing hiring managers to meticulously shortlist.
By seeing people directly, you automatically assess their personality and social skills and are more likely emphasise with their story as you’re more likely to know if it’s genuine. It a allows us to use our ‘gut instincts’ and intuition which can inform us when something isn’t ‘quite right’ about that person for this position.
By using Empathic Recruitment, employers can know who they’re interviewing before they’ve even met them.
Technology in Recruitment is Great With a Human Touch
Why do you need a human touch?
Recruitment Technology is growing fast and can save a lot of time when used correctly. You do still need a human involved to get the most of technology. Automating recruitment completely is impossible, for now! Finding people with suitable skills for a role is one thing and AI allows us to automate that pretty well. Finding someone who fits a particular business is a lot more complicated.
With the recruitment process as it stands, matching these are often a complete lottery. It’s an especially important consideration when avoiding a low retention of staff. So why is phase one of shortlisting based purely on CV’s when you can’t see these traits on paper? It’s always worth establishing genuine connections with as many applicants as you can in order to find the right stuff which simply isn’t possible when looking at a CV.
Whoever you hire, will not only contribute to representing your company to your customers and other prospects, but they could potentially contribute to positive or negative change internally too. Negativity or unhappiness can be as contagious as a laugh or positivity in an office environment.
Video Recruitment Technology and AI
Video recruitment allows you to have a snapshot of every person that has shown an interest in your business. They don’t have to answer questions on the spot and can do so without travel. It allows you to compare candidates more easily. Boolean search is a Recruiters searching language of choice. There are huge developments in this now that allows searches to think for themselves.
Our objective is to change the paper-based recruitment practices into a process that focuses on human connection and emotional intelligence. When a candidate’s individual skills and qualifications match your job, it doesn’t mean they will match your team, direct report or overall company culture. We called the methodology of focusing on this Empathic Recruitment ℠.
We use artificially intelligent searching software to make sure we reach out to as many suitable candidates as possible!
Dealing with a Bad Boss
There is nothing worse than dealing with a bad boss. Having a conflicting relationship with your boss can leave you demotivated and frustrated. It’s not all about your work a bad boss will overlook or take credit for your good performances. If you have this problem, it’s safe to say they’re being a bad boss.
Just to confirm:
- A boss that criticizes, shouts or publically humiliates employees is a bad boss.
- If they bullies, intimidates, name-calls, or treats you as stupid, is a bad boss.
- Someone who condones bad behaviour, and takes sides with friends, is a bad boss.
Everyone deserves a professional environment. Sometimes a bad boss generally doesn’t know they’re bad and it can be temperamental. There so many reasons it’s best not to judge. Being promoted too quickly with little training or personal issues or a lack of support from their Boss can all trigger this. Bosses who don’t understand or violate laws are more often signs of inexperience than anything else.
Before finding a new job, follow this advice:
- Politely talk to your boss, identifying you need support. Don’t call them a bad boss.
- Consult managers for advice to widen your opportunities internally where you can.
- Consult your boss’s manager or Human Resources for assistance and advice if stranded. Your boss will dislike this, so don’t down talk the boss and focus on the issues.
- Lastly, if your boss won’t change, propose a job transfer rather than quitting.
- If all fails, quietly search for new jobs. You deserve better.
Keep your job to maintain your income and preventing any gaps, (although unfair it makes getting back into work more difficult) until a new position becomes available.
If you really can’t make it work with your boss its time for a career change, click here and we can help you find your next opportunity!
Why we need Empathic Recruitment℠
Empathic Recruitment focuses on personality and culture matching. Empathy can be the missing ingredient to a good employee or finding one in the first place. Without it, a “what’s in it for me” quick buck mentality can quickly develop. When missing empathy, it helps maintain an ideology where our perception of perfection measures one area; Academic ability, when there is a full spectrum of considerations needed to truly identify perfection.
Perfection is also dependent on what context it’s in
Someone might be perfect for a precise job or business but may not be for others. This could be the same role at a competitor but the internal staff structure and culture may not fit. We conclude suitability from a CV when shortlisting which is open to misinterpretation or manipulation. The way companies engage when using agencies, can create ulterior motives that break down trust and communication.
The truth is, being academic doesn’t mean someone knows how to apply it, or whether they’re motivated to do so. It’s the emotional part of the brain that dictates which option is preferable/suitable or profitable. It’s what tells us when to stop comparing features, costs, risks or benefits of different options available to us and deciding what’s best. You simply cannot express these abilities from a CV.
As if this wasn’t important enough, emotions also alert us to factors that our conscious, rational awareness can miss. That’s despite their critical importance to us in the future. ‘Gut feelings’ or ‘intuition’ can inform us when something is not quite right about a person, a situation or a business deal even when they look good on paper.
There’s an example of this in an office scenario most employers could probably relate too.
You hire a new junior with limited experience within an office of experts. The rapport between this person and the team is there immediately. They consequently absorb information and the knowledge they need from colleagues quickly. You then employ someone who’s already an expert in the industry. They do it differently and doesn’t agree with the rest of them. The internal communication shrinks and productivity of that office shrink with it.
They say knowledge is power, and the more people you know, the more knowledge you have access to which I agree with. When someone works within a company, they retain significant information that could be useful to the rest of the team. That knowledge can be lost if staff don’t get along or have conflicting goals or morals to each other. That’s why it’s key to consider this when recruiting. The collaboration of like-minded professionals within businesses would make a huge difference to the company’s output.
I guess the big question is, How do you resolve these problems in the recruitment process?
Firstly, we use artificially intelligent semantic searching software with job boards and social media allowing us to identify the best candidates based on online information such as CV’s. This gathers a pool of candidates who seem to have the skills. We let them know about the role in case it’s of interest. We include an Interactive Video Platform (IVP) tool in our shortlisting process allowing candidates to submit video responses to automated questions within the applications. It gives employees a snapshot of someone’s personality delivering an emotional and social competency matching mechanism. It also saves a significant amount of time for both whiles increasing the value of the shortlisting data tremendously. Employers will know who they are interviewing before they’ve met them and conduct live interviews to where convenient. We call this approach Empathic Recruitment ℠.
10 Most Common Interview Questions and How to Tackle Them
It’s always worth being prepared for traditional interview questions hiring managers are known to ask, so here are some tips along with ten of the most commonly asked questions and hows best to answer them.
It’s important that you don’t memorise your answers word for word, just the concept as you don’t want to sound rehearsed, it needs to be natural. Would you rehearse a conversation and write it down if it was a mate? This precise mindset also creates so much pressure and room technically for an error you won’t come across as your normal self and it is a promoter of nervousness. Be polite, shake their hand, show confidence by being yourself!
Most Common Interview Questions and Answers
What is your greatest strength?
Very popular interview question. Discuss what you feel your strengths are but tie them into as many examples of recent roles, projects or work experience you have gained that’s still relevant to what you’re interviewing for. This works really well and is ultimately what the manager needs to know to assess your suitability properly.
What is your greatest weakness?
Everyone has a weakness, so identify one with a positive attitude towards it. Depending on who’s interviewing this could go either way. Theirs no point in hiding any weaknesses, everyone has something and if someone doesn’t want you for being honest unless this weakness makes incapable of doing the role, maybe they aren’t the right manager for you.
Tell me about yourself.
Don’t share too much, but give a decent insight and try and show some personality. Identify some interests which don’t relate directly to work.
Why should we hire you?
Explain why you feel you’re a solid match, highlighting as many areas you can relate to or by using anecdotes of previous similar successes and ultimately, identifying what you can offer the company.
What are your salary expectations?
Know beforehand what salary you expect from that role, otherwise, you may lowball yourself.
Why are you leaving or have left your previous job?
Be direct with the facts, providing a genuine reason. Be cautious not to down talk previous companies or managers, instead identify the differences in experiences to this new opportunity that made you feel their position was a better fit for you.
Why do you want this job?
Research the role and company beforehand. Explain what areas of the business interest you the most, identifying why the company appeals to you.
How do you handle stress and pressure?
Prepare an example of how you resolved a stressful situation in a previous job. It’ always a good one to have a few examples of because its also one of the questions people will often fail at, even though they have loads of example once the pressure has gone.
Describe a difficult work situation/project, and how you overcame it.
Again, give an example of how you resolved a stressful situation in a previous job. The interviewer wants to know how you tackle challenging situations.
What are your goals for the future?
The hiring manager recruits someone who will stay with the company. Identifying you wish to seek financial security and progression with this company supports this.
Do you have any questions?
They’ll often ask this as well. Prepare a list of questions you’d like answered in preparation for an interview but don’t ask questions just because you feel you should. If there’s nothing you genuinely want to find out about the business other than whats on a spec, it’s probably not the right company for you!
Put Limitation on Discrimination When Applying for Jobs
Discrimination is an ongoing issue in the world, including in recruitment. People can often be unsuccessful while applying for job opportunities and I’ve noticed a frustrating reason behind this. Assumptions! They can easily interfere with someone’s judgement of the paper version of yourself. It’s generally a factor when the idea of equal opportunities fail and here’s why…
People can pick up trends naturally or other people that promote discrimination based on someone’s background
The Equality Act highlights a good portion of these characteristics. Age, disability, gender, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation are common. But even previous job roles can influence the Managers interpretation.
I heard an example when a candidate was rejected for an interview by the Hiring Manager. They said they felt they would be too ‘aggressive’ based on their previous role. The candidate had worked as a credit controller, a position some assume you need to be aggressive. The candidate was seemingly a lovely person with a good sense of humour, so this was somewhat saddening.
People are denied equal opportunities for various reasons, but it’s commonly because of these well-established trends and a lack of initial information. Sometimes falsely assumed trends within society make an impact. Another example I often hear is when a candidate doesn’t get shortlisted because their employment initiated a long time ago. They were concerned they wouldn’t adapt to new technology, modern-day systems or processes.
The truth is when a Manager has five suitable CV’s and needs to shortlist down to three, trends may sadly reflect their final decision.
So, how do we overcome this?
We provide an interactive video interviewing platform with automated questioning so candidates can represent specific qualities a CV can’t during their application. By answering screening questions via webcam, you can prevent losing out to purely paper-based shortlisting and the assumptions that come with it! Users can also conduct interviews online, compare applications with colleagues via the IVP to hire the right person for the team, as well as the job description. It matches personalities from existing teams meaning a stronger office chemistry, a scenario everyone benefits from.
Although this won’t stop intentional discrimination, it will prevent assumptive or subconscious discrimination by giving people more information to make the right choice.
Want to stop cold callers? Here’s how
No one likes a receiving a cold call, we all know that, but no one particularly likes doing them either. So why is this technique still the main avenue of gaining opportunities for the majority of suppliers?
The reality is, it’s because sometimes it works.
Anyone in a competitive industry will always cold call because companies won’t call for help in a competitive market. They can be spoiled for choice so calling the business is the only way show you’re better than the competition. It’s a long process, it annoys businesses. It costs our economy with all that wasted work too. A 1-10 call conversation rate would be considered as excellent. That’s 9 calls you’ve had to make and at the cost of someone else’s time in the other 9 prospective businesses.
To top this off, I find an engagement that starts with this often create a ‘work for’ rather than a ‘work with’ relationship. It’s never as productive as it could have been the other way around.
There is a way that this problem could be fixed, and you’ll get the most out of your suppliers too.
Simply create an avenue where businesses can go to register their interest in working with you. Have a well marketed annual review for these to suppliers and invite them to explain why they deserve the opportunity to work with you.
This resolves some big issues straight away. It prevents already embedded suppliers getting complacent, but it would create healthy competition too. This means you get the best service. The benefit relevant to this blog is, once these companies know that’s your process, there’s no reason to keep calling you all year round.
It would also free up the phone line for relevant calls from clients or prospects you can convert that you may not have been able to previously. The outcome of this to a company’s output would be unquantifiable, literally, but we at least know it wouldn’t be negative, that’s for sure.
The Best Way to Keep Knowledge in Your Business
We all know knowledge is power, right?
And I guess the more people you know, the more knowledge you have access to. That makes it’s important to network in any job, or even in your personal life.
The reason this concept can be challenging to follow through with is we can’t always see the benefits of networking until they happen. That’s why you go so it can seem pointless initially. However, when you’re in an environment of like-minded people, this networking happens effortlessly instead with great results.
There is an important circumstance needed to make this scenario work.
Information sharing only works where rapport between individuals is there. Considering this when creating a recruitment strategy, isn’t it crucial new employees integrate well as a team to promote this? If that’s the case, shouldn’t this influence the way we choose who’s really best for the business? The recruitment process we all know focuses purely on academics. Without seeing someone’s personality through the application process it’s hard to tell someone’s suitability.
This has a significant impact on the overall well-being and productivity of any workforce. You will either get ideas during team brainstorms collaborating the best of each other’s thoughts. Or you get the same idea you would have had from the most forward individual on their own. Poor communication is often the cause and could be prevented if the way we apply focused on this.
By recruiting with this knowledge in mind, you’ll find internal communications would increase.
People would enjoy their working environment more having a positive impact. The reason it’s necessary is that it retains industry knowledge gathered within the businesses network and is shared with new employees! More efficient, more enjoyable and more profitable!