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The buzz in recruiting over the last few years has been centered on mobile. Certainly it’s true that mobile is on the rise, and businesses should be preparing for that. However, Talent Leaders still want to keep track of every method a candidate may use to view their job descriptions online.
Talent Leaders can use this information to replicate the candidate experience, and develop strategies to better serve their audience. As a company grows, so does its geographic footprint. It’s also likely that the types of jobs a growing company recruits for becomes more diverse.
This makes it critical to better understand some very simple behaviors on your careers site, and begin to better understand your candidate experience.
Which technologies are candidates using…
Operating System
We’ve been surprised by the amount of candidates utilizing Windows OS as they search for new job opportunities. We knew there would still be a high
number of folks running this OS, but not 2 out of 3 candidates. In hindsight, this should not have been a big surprise. Our data is currently aggregated across 4 continents, and our audience is generally enterprise-level companies.
Important to note is that while lots of attention is being paid to mobile, almost 63% of our audience is looking at job pages through a more traditional source. This means making sure that our platform is running on various versions of the Windows OS that may be running worldwide.
It’s important for us to know what candidates are seeing on various versions of the OS. It can be the difference between getting a great applicant to click apply or not.
Browser
The operating system is important, but browsers are a deeper level of candidate experience. If you take a look at your job descriptions on multiple browsers, you’re likely to see differences in the way they appear and function.
Why is this important? Because there are multiple browsers and subsequent versions being used by candidates.
In our case, many of our early enterprise customers were based in San Francisco, New York City, and London. The adoption of a browser such as Chrome was much higher in those markets. As we’ve grown across regions such as Asia, we’ve seen a large spike in Internet Explorer traffic. Some of those candidates are still running older browsers such as IE7.
By tracking this, we’ve been able to ensure a more consistent candidate experience. This also increases the odds of a top candidate clicking apply or sharing the job with a friend.
Mobile Operating System
From the total traffic numbers we can see that roughly 14% of traffic (and rising) is hitting our job pages through a mobile device. It’s important to take note 
of what your pages will look like, and how useable they are, on each type of mobile OS.
This can have a specific influence on choices an enterprise company will make in implementing responsive design to their job pages. It can also impact decisions you make on the mobile application process.
For us, it’s easy to see that the dominant players in mobile are iOS and Android. This wasn’t really a surprise, nor was the ratio of iOS to Android.
This is highly valuable information, and we’d encourage companies to look deeper at Mobile OS data on a location level. Much like we found with Chrome, there are regional tendencies with iOS.
…and when
Peak Viewing Periods
In addition to knowing what technology
candidates are using to view your job pages, it’s also valuable to know when they are viewing them. This helps Talent Leaders optimize when they are posting job content and sharing jobs.
For example, many companies have employees automatically signed into systems like Jobvite and RolePoint to drive referrals. These systems automatically share jobs into an employee’s social feeds. You’ll want to make sure you align the automated sharing with peak viewing periods.
By looking at this graph of peak viewing periods, you can see that sharing on the weekends and in the evening may not provide as many views as mid-day on Monday.
We’ve taken direction from this information, and look to launch job campaigns in accordance with peak periods of candidate viewership.
