So, there are more mobile phones in the UK than people! It is correct to say that nearly every job seeker has a mobile phone. WOW, surely a great platform to advertise jobs on? This must be a well worthwhile development investment for every jobs-based website in the UK! Or is it a total waste of money?
Statistics were released from AdMob for September, which shows the handsets being used, their capabilities and market share.
Interestingly, the majority of mobile browsing is carried out on standard handsets, not just those designed to have full screens, qwerty keyboards or touch screens. The common screen size is 176px by 208px - for browsing this is quite small. On standard job websites, the job seeker is treated to a page of job results normally showing job title, salary, location and a short summary. This information is needed so the job seeker can decide their interest level in a particular position. Scanning of the results is typically done vertically down the screen, making use of the entire length of the monitor. 176px by 208px is not going to give anywhere near the same experience - this suggests a successful mobile job-seeking tool needs a more creative solution than porting current search features straight to mobile.
The stats show a strong uptake of UTMS / Edge. Both are technologies the consumer knows more as 3G or faster mobile web. This is a great sign; the early days of mobile browsing, with the initial hype around 10 years ago of WAP, was slow and annoying! This is a great sign for the job seeking mobile application.
Mobile Advertising is growing. All the analysts are highlighting this fact and expect to yet see further growth in this field.
So - we have good technology out there; it is not too slow and advertising on mobile web is growing. The only downside is that mainstream devices are difficult to view large pages on and do not overcome the small screen size. This issue has been overcome extremely well on the latest Apple iPhone, which allows easy scrolling and zooming. However, these types of devices are not yet widespread.
Based on a very unscientific poll of colleagues and friends, the biggest mobile web usage is news, email, photos and train times, in that order. With technology overcoming the problems linked with creative solutions targeting the smaller screen, it is only a matter of time before job seeking is a serious mobile web usage. The killer question may well not be if job seeking becomes common place on mobile, but when will it become common place.
In the meanwhile, before everyone is using web-friendly iPhone style-devices, I believe mobile job seeking applications should provide supplementary job seeker support, building on top of the experience of standard based web sites.
Join our vote which went out in our November Newsletter....
Tell us your view on jobs on the mobile. Will it benefit the recruitment marketplace?
In April 2007, it was recorded by the Mobile Data Association that there were 15 million web users via the mobile. How do you think that this trend will help benefit the recruitment marketplace? How much would you pay to advertise on the mobile web?
Here at Allthetopbananas.com, we are currently investigating this area in depth and would really enjoy hearing your views and thoughts - comment on this blog, email me at Dave@Allthetopbananas.com or just pick the phone up and talk to us on 0871 4343438