ManpowerGroup Solutions
100 Manpower Place, Milwaukee
www.manpowergroup.com
Jibe
96 Morton St., New York, NY
www.jibe.com
Innovation: Mobile job application technology
Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup has added a new tool to its arsenal of solutions for employers: mobile job application and recruitment technology.
The workforce solutions firm has partnered with New York-based recruitment technology developer Jibe to offer its Mobile Apply and Recruiting Analytics tools to its global client base.
According to an April survey of 1,000 employees and job seekers by career community Glassdoor Inc., the number of people using mobile devices like tablets and smart phones during a job search is increasing. About 90 percent of job seekers said they are likely to use such a device during their job search in the next year, up 7 percent from the same survey a year ago.
Online job board CareerBuilder.com reported that about 33 percent of its monthly site traffic comes from mobile devices. When those users encounter a non-mobile friendly job application, about 40 percent of mobile candidates leave the application page. This gives mobile-optimized company websites a leg up, CareerBuilder said.
So the Jibe technology is a necessary innovation for ManpowerGroup Solutions’ clients, said Jim McCoy, vice president at ManpowerGroup Solutions and RPO practice lead.
“When we take a look at ManpowerGroup’s own research around the hardest jobs to fill … 70 percent of those jobs are jobs where you typically are working with an employee who doesn’t have regular access to the Internet,” McCoy said.
These employees include drivers, engineers, skilled labor, electricians and teachers. The best way to attract candidates in those fields may be through their mobile devices, he said.
“One of the major areas for improvement in a lot of the traditional applicant tracking systems or web tools are they haven’t been optimized for mobile,” McCoy said.
Jibe is an overlay to clients’ existing technology, making it quick and easy to integrate into existing web applications, he said. It mirrors the existing application system, allowing for better user functionality and readability.
Jibe has a patent pending on its mirroring technology, which allows the candidate to interact with the Jibe software and the employer’s applicant tracking system in real time, said Mike Pauletich, senior vice president of alliances at Jibe.
“We sit on top of the clients’ back end human resources system, their applicant tracking system, and we provide a candidate experience that is optimal for any device that the candidate chooses to use to enter the client’s career website,” Pauletich said.
Initially, Jibe was designed to work only on mobile devices, but clients eventually asked the firm to tailor its solutions for ease of use on any computer.
The technology usually displays as a link from the mobile website that says something like “click here for a mobile friendly version,” McCoy said.
“On the mobile device, you don’t have to pinch the screen to make it larger,” Pauletich said. “It’s all developed in responsive design, so it will work on any device and reacts to the screen size.”
Application questions are displayed in a mobile friendly way, with one question per page and large buttons, with no scrolling needed to allow for quicker movement through the Q&A process.
And for those who want to apply straight from their phones, Jibe scrapes personal data and job experience information from a candidate’s LinkedIn or other social media accounts to quickly create a resume. It can even use a forwarded email attachment to create a resume from a mobile device.
“We’re one of the only (mobile job application developers) that allows an email option, which is one of the most popular methods for someone to upload their resume,” Pauletich said.
ManpowerGroup is Jibe’s only RPO partner, and Jibe has seen great traction both domestically and internationally since the partnership was formed, he said.
“The adoption really centers around those people who are looking for career information first,” McCoy said. “That, for us, was the most fundamental thing to add, because then people will look through a job at an employer website, find out if they want to apply, and then they may start and finish the application later in the day (from a laptop or desktop).”
Since the most recent ManpowerGroup Outlook Survey showed 24 percent of southeastern Wisconsin employers were planning to hire in the second quarter, tools like Jibe are likely to be especially useful for passive candidate recruitment.
“Less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 (companies) actually provide an optimized experience from a mobile device in their career process,” Pauletich said. “We’re rapidly changing that.”
