Enterprise apps are causing a seismic shift in business. Regardless of the industry, be it healthcare or logistics, finance or education, through an increase in worker productivity, optimisation of business process efficiency and the leveraging of big data, the rise of enterprise apps is rapidly changing the way in which professionals do business, and the recruitment sector should be no different. By Paul Swaddle, Chairman, Pocket App.

Let’s be honest, from a consumer/job seeker perspective, mobile recruiting has become increasingly popular. According to a survey by LinkedIn, 64 percent of active candidates browse on social media networks via their mobile devices for new career opportunities. Additionally, the rise of mobile recruitment has enabled job seekers and recruiters alike to access and request information easily, submit and review applications, and keep communication flowing quickly. We know this better than most having designed an app for our client, London-based recruitment agency, Inspiring Interns. The organisation’s core function is to search for talented, intelligent, and motivated young interns who want to learn, grow and most importantly make a positive contribution through their skill-set and attitude.

The app was designed to help graduates kick-start their careers by enabling them to send Inspiring Interns their own video CV’s, straight from their mobiles. Armed with these CV’s, Inspiring Interns could then send the newly created profiles to relevant employers.

However, although the recruitment industry has gleefully accepted the benefits that these outward facing applications offer, what is often missed is that enterprise applications should also be maximised to enable the professionals working within the recruitment industry to work much more efficiently. For the uninitiated, when I refer to ‘enterprise apps’ I am talking about mobile solutions that face inward within the enterprise, as opposed to external facing, or consumer focussed applications. An example of which is an application we designed for another of our clients, Mizuho.

Time for another quick anecdote, Mizuho approached us to aid in internal employee engagement. They had a particular issue with staff hotdesking and locating where their employees were sat on any given day. The application we designed for them, which included the popular hot-desk locator, which tells you where a specific person (chosen from a directory of all employees) is sat on that current day, aligned internal communications and assisted in cutting through the clutter of internal emails to quickly and effectively afford remote workers access to business critical and time sensitive information, no matter where they are working.

Enterprise apps such as these, have been shown to increase worker productivity by as much as 40 percent and not only help employees carry out their tasks more efficiently, but also allow them to free up extra time that can be spent generating additional revenue for their respective organisations. As co-founder of an organisation which has held mobile apps clinics centred on the ways in which organisations can streamline processes and reduce costs using mobile applications, I often find myself waxing lyrical on the ways in which businesses can harness the power of mobile apps to modernise and mobilise their internal and external processes.

1: Keep it simple. If you are rolling out mobile apps across multiple devices remember that if you create the most up-to-date and modern app folks might not be able to utilise it if they don’t have the latest device.

2: Mobile apps don’t have to cost the earth. You could be talking about tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands.

3: All of the examples provided were completed in a matter of weeks, not months and years, so you really can have it delivered quickly