Smartphones are more central to the way in which people browse the internet than ever before. Currently two billion people access the internet through their smartphones only, and that number is projected to increase to 72.5% of internet browsers by 2025. With that in mind, it's never been more important to use mobile first design in your recruitment process. But what exactly does that mean? In this article, we'll be covering the importance of mobile first design, it's principles, and how using it can help our clients.

Why Mobile First Design is Key

As we've already noted, smartphones are a key component of the way we access the internet today. In 2018 alone over 50% of all global web traffic was via mobile phones, so designing your web pages with that in mind is now a must.

Making your website accessible will go part of the way towards making your business more accessible as well. Not only does it help to include those who don't have access to a desktop computer, but there is a large overlap between mobile first design and design for the hard of seeing. It will push you to make your webpage more readable on smaller screens, and to put the most important content first, benefitting those with cognitive difficulties as well.

Principles of Mobile First Design

We've named two principles already - making text as readable as possible, and putting the most important content first - but they bear emphasising. Because of the small screen size, content must be made concise and clear, and all the necessary information should be within a few clicks, and visible at first glance. More than this, simplicity is incredibly important, as browsers on a mobile phone aren't using a cursor, and need to be able to navigate smoothly.

Simplicity will also ensure you retain your users. Even more so than on a desktop, browsers on a phone are easily distracted, so they're likely to change windows at even a slight inconvenience. This makes good performance necessary as well, even a little buffering might be enough to turn your users off. Finally, mobile first design means using the same design across various devices - smartphones, tablets, and desktops - so that the experience is the same no matter what device people view your device on. Providing a seamless experience will make sure that users don't get confused or frustrated.

How it can help our clients

Eric Schmidt, former CEO at Google, famously announced at the Mobile World Congress in 2010 that developers inside and outside of Google would need to focus on mobile first for the next decade. More than a decade later, and it's clear that he was right - since 2018, Google has said that they now use mobile first indexing for more than half of all web pages globally.

But what does this mean for our clients? Well, mobile first indexing means that Google will check the mobile version of a website to rank it, even more than the desktop version. It is essential that your mobile websites are at a high standard, so that your website will appear higher amongst other competitors. Since Google remains the most popular online search engine, with more than 86% of the search market share, if you want to get your website to the front of the queue, mobile first design is crucial.

Mobile first design with inploi

If you're looking to integrate a mobile first experience into your conversion processes, then inploi ensure that you have a first-class careers hub, including employer branding space, a powerful job search, and customisable chatbot apply flows, all as part of a mobile first design. All of this is built into the product, making it as worry free and easy to use as possible for your company.

Our platform will give you all the benefits of mobile first design - including accessibility, simplicity and performance - along with a best-in-class candidate experience that increases conversion rates, improves the efficiency of your recruitment spend and fills your vacancies more quickly.

Get in touch here to learn more and find out how you can transform your talent attraction with inploi.