This trend has had a dramatic effect on how jobseekers engage with job boards and highlights the importance of ensuring your online recruitment business is fully mobile optimised. Failing to recognise the importance of mobile will have a detrimental effect on your brand, recruitment revenues and crucially jobseeker engagement.

Since the iPhone was launched in 2007, mobile technology has revolutionised how we communicate on a fundamental level. We can now access a huge array of information and services from any location at any time and in many cases using multiple devices. That being said, for many people mobile devices have become the primary tool for accessing the internet and they are just as likely to use their device from the comfort of their home using a WiFi connection. I know personally I seldom use my laptop at home any more unless I need to use a specific Microsoft application such as Excel or edit my latest holiday snaps. The majority of my time online is now via my iPad or Android smartphone using my broadband connection so does that classify me as a mobile user?

The impact of mobile

At Madgex we continue to see dramatic increases in mobile traffic across our clients’ job boards with an average of 20% – 25% of all traffic originating from mobile devices. This varies across sectors & niches, however in some cases we have seen figures as high as 40% of traffic coming from iPad alone. When we reflect on earlier research conducted in December 2009 we were seeing mobile traffic levels at 1.5% – 2% on average. These figures clearly demonstrate the huge uplifts we have seen over the last three years.

When we analyse mobile jobseekers’ behaviour the high volumes of traffic are not yet converting into a proportionate volume of applications. On the surface this may seem strange, but would you apply for your next role on a crowded noisy bus? In actual fact jobseekers are tending to use mobile devices predominantly for searching, emailing, sharing and bookmarking relevant jobs, then applying from their desktop wherever that may be. Over time this pattern will no doubt change, but for the time being desktop is still the preferred channel for the majority of job applications.

Looking beyond direct traffic from mobile, email still plays a vital role in driving high quality applications. The implication here for job boards is that between 27% – 40% (depending on which report you read) of people access their email via their smartphone. In order to provide the best possible user experience and capitalise on this traffic you must have a mobile optimised site. If a jobseeker receives an email alert and they open the link to a job board which is not optimised then naturally this makes it very difficult to both read the job detail and also apply for the position through their mobile device.

Innovation is the key to a successful mobile strategy

At Madgex we have been providing mobile job board solutions for over nearly four years now and recently launched our latest HTML 5 mobile web app to further enhance our mobile offering, with our 3rd generation iPhone and Android apps surfacing in March. As with all our projects we undertook numerous rounds of user testing and held focus groups with jobseekers, recruiters and job board owners to understand their individual sets of needs. One of most requested features by our clients we acted upon was the inclusion of mobile specific sales inventory to help monetise mobile audiences. This not only helps increase revenues but also enables recruiters to target mobile users.

Our product roadmap will continue to adapt to the rapidly changing mobile landscape to provide a broad range of mobile services. The next stage of our work on mobile will be a project looking at responsive design, a prototype of which has already been created during our annual Hack Day in February.

Paul Eustice, Mobile JavaScript Developer at Madgex, comments “sites that were once desktop-only can now be built to suit the form factors of the multitude of devices accessing them. They can respond to different screen sizes to provide the best possible experience to every user, regardless of whether a site is being viewed on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or smart TV.” Some laptops can now detach their keyboard and become tablets. Touch screens we once only found on a smartphone can now be found on laptops and even desktop screens.

The feedback we’ve had from our client base is that mobile will continue to be a vitally important channel for the foreseeable future. The increasing number of jobseekers using mobile will continue to grow and technology will provide job boards with opportunities to provide relevant jobs, content and tools to their audience. If you are a job board owner and don’t have a coherent mobile experience you are missing out on a huge audience and falling behind the competition.

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Each job board owner has a different set of categories, or a different way of classifying their jobs but the same principles of organisation can be applied to make sure a classification system works well for the business and the user.

A faceted classification system allows you to give an object (like a job or a book) multiple classifications and then people can find things in ways that suit them. For example, a collection of books might be classified using an author facet, a subject facet, a date facet, etc. Most job boards divide their jobs into similar categories or facets, for example industry, location, salary and hours. One person might want to look for a job by location, another by industry, the next by contract type.  How you group, order and balance categories and also the number of options within facets will have an impact on the usability of the classification system.

Not all users like using keyword search and sometimes if a jobseeker isn’t totally clear what they’re looking for then browsing is the best option. Faceted navigation needs to provide a solid information trail or ‘information scent’ that will guide users quickly to their destination and the information they are seeking.

What happens if we have too much choice?

People have difficulty processing large amounts of information and this can lead to ‘choice-blindness’. If we are presented with too many options we can feel overwhelmed and unable to make a decision or at least unable to make it quickly and efficiently. This is what psychologists call cognitive overload.

Too many choices can lead to decision-making paralysis for your users. (Hall and Johansson – Psychologists)

If offered too many options the brain can be overwhelmed by decision. When we feel our options are manageable we are able to make better decisions. With vast amounts of information it is best to group information into manageable chunks. Then we can make quicker and easier sequential decisions.

Hick’s Law, named after British Psychologist William Hick, states that the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. As the decision time increases, the user experience suffers.

People are more likely to make a purchase when offered a limited number of choices. What’s more, they are actually more likely to be satisfied with their selection when the choice is less. The more options, the more we might feel that we missed something.

Resist the impulse to provide lots and lots of choices to your customers. You will think that lots of choices is a good thing (because you like them too), but too many choices means they won’t buy at all. (Susan Weinschenk – Neuropsychologist)

When you place a lot of options in front of a user it is more than likely that they will reach a point where satisfaction drops. The goal is perhaps to find the sweet spot on the satisfaction curve so that we provide an optimum number for the experience to be good.

Good sense would suggest that the optimum number should be as much as you need and no more.  Finding this ‘optimum number’ can sometimes be difficult and may require thought and research.

Sites such as Amazon or Marks & Spencer tend to have up to 50 or 60 options within facets, which is often a necessary number when you have a lot of products. Similarly, if we view jobs as products, a job board has a multitude of goods on offer and is likely to need a lot of categories.

Best practice would be to keep the number of top-level categories at a manageable number. So, although there is no magic number, smaller is always better and no more than 50 or 60 options should be considered. The control and structure of groupings is paramount in the management of broad categories to ensure browsing is efficient and painless.

This is part of a more detailed document prepared for Madgex clients on User-Focused Classification for Job Boards (2MB – PDF).

To keep up to date with the latest news from Madgex follow us on Twitter @Madgex

Reference and further reading:

Hicks Law

Susan Weinschenk. You want more choices and information than you can actually process

Sheena Iyengar. The Art of Choosing (Published 2010).

Peter Johansson. Choice Blindness

Barry Schwarz. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (Published 2004)

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Revenue share or flat fee?

Some providers offer a revenue share model, which can can be attractive in the short term but can easily reach a tipping point where you end up paying much more than with a flat fee provider. Be sure to factor this into your plan.

Ownership of content?

Contractually, who will own your job ads and user profile databases? Some providers require you to sign over ownership of everything to them, which limits your opportunities and means you get left with nothing if you ever want to migrate to another provider.

ROI modelling and pre-sales consultancy?

Will the provider help you produce an ROI model to ascertain what kind of sales you need to be making in order to turn a profit? Is the ROI model detailed enough to encompass the true costs of running a job board business?

Hidden transactional fees?

Some providers charge you per-transaction for certain things, which can increase the total cost of ownership. This is another reason why you’ll need a realistic ROI model to compare platforms.

Enhancements programme included?

Some providers will sell you a single version of their software, and then expect you to have to pay additional fees if you want upgrades and enhancements. Other providers include periodical enhancements as part of the bundled service, to improve the user experience and conversion rates of your site. If you find they do include enhancements, it’s always wise to ask to see the roadmap for the last 12 months and 12 months in the future, to get a feel for the value you’d be getting.

Breadth of commercial inventory?

As your sales team and user-base bed in to your new platform, a range of upsells will allow you to make the most out of recruiters who have money to spend, particularly when you can tell them the average application rate uplift that an upsell can bring.

SEO Automation?

Most job board platforms provide some kind of SEO functionality that allows you to create landing pages and campaigns. However, some platforms require a lot of administrative “busywork”, while others automate the bulk of the hard work, bringing cost savings.

Feature lists or feature quality?

When looking at a feature list, don’t focus in on the number of bullet points. A well designed job board platform provides you a revenue stream through great conversion rates through ease of use, not through a myriad of features.

Always ask to see case studies and uplift statistics that other customers have had when moving onto the platform in question.

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