HR Delivery? Mobile First!

Last week, I went on a family camping trip. My niece was a bit out of sorts as her boyfriend had other plans and could not join us. Needless to say, she spent quite a bit of the weekend texting on her phone.

At the end of the trip I noticed she had stayed in touch with him through texting but never once called him. When I asked her about it, she just looked at me blankly.

I immediately realized that her generation is Mobile First to the extent of Mobile Only. Ironically, they are glued to their smartphones but they don’t use them for calls. They use Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat to keep in touch with friends and family, and even their very significant others.

One of the reasons that Facebook is losing the 12-18 year olds is that they were late moving into the mobile space. They are catching up, but they had to spend big dollars in order to get there. Mobile has quickly become the dominant influence on pretty much every new feature social networks launch.

So what I’ve learned from this trip is that when rethinking your HR Strategy, mobile has to play a big part, and maybe the dominant part. Even if you don’t have the right technology in place yet, think very hard about how to get there. It won’t be long before you’ll have to go with Mobile First!