Five Mobile Apps for Recruiters

Within a year, more than a quarter of recruiters and 1 in 5 hiring managers worldwide will use some type of mobile app for recruiting.

That’s up from 16 percent of recruiters and 11 percent of hiring managers who use recruiting apps today, according to the 2012–2013 HR Systems Survey from tech vendor CedarCrestone Inc.

Recruiters and hiring managers were among the first human resources professionals to rely on smartphones and apps to get work done. Their ranks continue to expand as smartphones become ubiquitous and more HR technology vendors develop mobile versions of recruiting and other software.

Mobile recruiting has progressed to the point where recruiters no longer have to sell upper management on why it’s important to an overall hiring strategy, says Michael Marlatt, founder of the mRecruitingcamp conference and staffing consultant for Microsoft Corp. The new question managers ask, Marlatt says, is: ” ‘Help us understand how to get there.’ “.

Not all recruiters are as optimistic. “To be honest, I’ve played with mobile apps designed for recruiting, and while interesting, none have become a permanent part of my strategy or anyone on my team’s strategy,” says Jeremy Roberts, a talent sourcing manager at Honeywell International Inc. “As far as things designed only for recruiting, none have really taken hold yet.”

If you’re ready to give them a try, here’s what Marlatt and other recruiting experts say are some of the more popular or promising recruiting apps:

Cardmunch, LinkedIn

Description: Recruiters can use this app to turn a smartphone into a business card reader. Photograph a business card and the data are transmitted to cardmunch servers where it’s transcribed and pushed back to an address book. If a recruiter uses LinkedIn, which bought cardmunch in 2011, data is automatically added to their LinkedIn connections. A company spokeswoman says the service has been used to transcribe 2 million business cards. “From a confessed contact obsessive, this is a time-saver and a genius app,” one user writes on the iTunes store.

Free

Works on iOS devices

Installs not disclosed

Evernote Hello, Evernote Corp.

Description: The year-old app turns the popular Evernote productivity software into a 21st century address book. When a recruiter meets someone, they can use a smartphone and the app to take the person’s picture, capture business card info, or jot down a few notes—all data they can search later. “It’s a useful tool to record that moment in time so you can put the face with a name,” Marlatt says.

Free

Works on Android and Apple iOS devices

100,000 to 500,000 Android installs in the past 30 days, iOS installs not available

LinkedIn, LinkedIn Corp.

Description: Recruiters are major users of the LinkedIn mobile app, which is the business network’s fastest growing consumer service, representing a quarter of unique visitors in the 90 days ended Sept. 30, according to the company. Officials won’t comment on plans for an app version of its popular LinkedIn Recruiter software. But Marlatt wouldn’t be surprised to see one in 2013. “They don’t want to show all their cards so fast,” he says. “They know there are a lot of competitors out there,” he says.

Free

Works on Android and Apple iOS devices

Total installs not disclosed, but Google Play store lists 5 million to 10 million Android installs in the past 30 days

Lookup, TalentBin

Description: The mobile version of Talent Bin’s people-oriented search engine, launched in September, combs through a prospective job candidate’s data on Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks and combines the results in a single profile. “The goal of Lookup is not as a mobile replacement of TalentBin, but as a complement recruiters can access on the run, say to look up a candidate they already discovered using TalentBin at their desktop,” says company founder Peter Kazanjy.

Free

Works on iOS devices; Android app is coming in 2013, Kazanjy says.

More than 10,000 installs

123People.com, yelster digital

Description: Recruiters and sourcers can use the people-oriented search engine app to pull data on potential job candidates from social media and other public sources, and share results via email, Facebook or Twitter or save to Instapaper to read later. “I’ve tested a lot of people-search applications,” Marlatt says. “Most of them are clunky or don’t yield good results. This is one of the best out there.” Besides English, the app is available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish.

Free

Works on Android and Apple iOS devices

650,000 installs

Michelle Rafter is a Workforce contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.