There is no doubt commercial truck driver demographics show an aging workforce. It’s one of the biggest concerns for the industry over the next 10 to 20 years.
While drivers may be aging, they are still adapting to new technologies and media habits. We’ve seen big changes in technology usage over the past few years, and you shouldn’t expect that to change. In fact, as older drivers begin to retire, your recruiting campaigns will be focused more and more on a driver population of digital natives with new tech.
It’s time to adapt your recruiting with the technologies drivers use, specifically mobile. Yet, you may be wondering, is mobile really that important?
The Rise of Mobile
The short answer is yes, but (like always) let’s dig into the stats.
Regardless of their age, mobile devices are increasingly being used by drivers. <a href=”http://In the 2014 Company Driver Connectivity Report, around 55.1% of drivers said they have accessed the internet on a smartphone or PDA. Another 22.3% had accessed the web from tablets as well.
Where were desktops in this list? Next to last, at 30%. Only laptops were able to beat out smartphones, by a margin of about 4.3%.
However, looking a little deeper, the report also showed that smartphones were the preferred tech for internet access, sitting at almost 40%. If you add in tablets from this figure, the percentage of drivers who prefer mobile devices is at around 50%.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Now that you know mobile is important, how can you optimize your recruiting efforts?
1. Stay Simple
The first step in creating a great mobile landing page is determining the content you’ll include. Given the small amount of screen space, it’s important to figure out exactly what information your visitors need and want to see.
Any text you include on a landing page needs to be short, sweet, and to the point.
You’ll also want to keep the steps involved from entry to submitting an application as simple as possible. Remember that phone screens are small, and typing in information on any mobile device can be difficult (tablets included).
Short forms are ok, but you should only require absolutely necessary information, i.e. a name and phone number. Click-to-call buttons, on the other hand, are optimal. This allows a driver who is interested in your fleet to directly connect with your recruiters.
Don’t ask for a full application on a mobile landing page.
2. Reduce Text Entry
Anyone who has fat fingers like me can tell you that using a smartphone keyboard isn’t always easy. Even when you’re using bigger screen tech, like iPads and other tablets, it can still be quite awkward. And you have to imagine that it can be aggravating for your audience to type in a lot of information from their tablets and mobile devices.
Blog: 7 Tips to Design Successful Landing Pages
Like we mentioned above, you want to keep things simple, but sometimes you need more information. Maybe you want to know how many years of experience a driver has, or what their preferred load is.
In this case, remove as many challenges as possible for mobile users.
When possible, use dropdown menus, checklists, and other pre-populated fields as a means of data entry. This helps minimize the challenges people face when typing into a smartphone.
3. Keep it Quick
Research shows that well over half (around 64%) of smartphone users want a webpage to load within four seconds or less. But the vast majority (around 82%) expect it to load within five.
Blog: 5 Easy Tips to Optimize Your Landing Pages
Considering that many drivers could be relying on 3G connections to access a page, you need to optimize your page to load quickly. How do you do this? It’s pretty simple. Strip out any . . .
- Large Images
- Videos
- Flash
- Java
The last two in the list above are critical. Apple products don’t support Flash, and have no intention of supporting it in the future. With iPhones making up around 30% of the market, you could potentially lose a lot of people. Additionally, both Flash and Java can be a huge drag on load time.
If your landing page load time is slow, drivers will click away.
Mobile landing pages are a new landscape for many recruiters, which means designing and building them can be a bit of a challenge. However, if you aren’t focused on mobile, you’re missing out on the thousands of drivers who are actively looking for new jobs on the mobile devices and tablets.
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