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Your mobile phone screen is a prime piece of real-estate, said Lord Alan Sugar to his new Apprentices this week. And he’s dead right: we use our mobiles for everything from checking our emails, shopping, reading the paper, watching videos, playing Angry Birds or Whirly Word… and also job hunting. Harnessing the potential of a smartphone App can do wonders for building brand loyalty and awareness by having your company’s brand splashed all over an app in your customer’s pocket.
In the recruitment industry, we have been lagging behind other sectors in this regard. Of course someone was bound to do it, and CPL have taken the leap to bring Ireland the first Irish-branded smartphone App for searching Irish jobs, available for free on the iTunes App Store.
CPLjobs App for iPhone
This has a really simple App design, nothing too taxing or complicated, and is rife with CPL branding. CPL Director and National Recruitment Federation Vice President Peter Cosgrove spoke to us at the NRF Conference yesterday about why they built the App:
We introduced the CPL App because of the way the market is at the moment: social media is yet another tool, younger people expect an app. While we have mobile technology, while we use job-boards, people use Apps more and more. We also have Push technology [within the App], at the moment [it] is only available for iPhones, but it will be available for Androids in about three weeks. We think it’s very positive and our candidates and clients [think] so as well.
Let’s face it, there’s nothing new about Jobs apps, and there are many out there. Amongst the Irish players, CPL is in the company of only two: I Want a New Job, created for Irish and International jobs searching in September 2010, and TxtAJob.ie mobile app, where you’ll receive text alerts for new jobs containing your keywords as they are announced.
So does developing an App make sense? Is it a worthwhile spend of your limited marketing budget? Firstly, developing an App can be done in-house using specialist Java tools, or through a web-developer (see irishwebdevelopers.com for a quote) and secondly, relationship-building with customers and clients is the only way to sustain business, and we really believe that creating a platform for your business on a device as popular and personal as one’s mobile phone is the next step after developing your company’s website. According to Return2Sender, there are 600,000 smartphones in use in Ireland, and sales of smartphones will outstrip sales of laptops and PC’s by 2013. So really the question you should be asking of your organisation is, Why haven’t we done this already?
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