It’s been a busy month… the kind that wears out suitcases and relationships. When it’s all said and done, it will be 10 conferences and two analyst confabs in slightly less than seven weeks. Endless hotel rooms, 15 extra pounds, routines decimated. Great dinners, new friends, fumbled emails

I even skipped a week so I could get a little work done. That’s how the 2012 Index of Social Technology in HR and Recruiting found its way into the light.

If anyone was a mobile worker, it was me. With an iPhone, an Android, an iPad and my sleek MacAir crammed into my briefcase, I was ready to set up shop wherever and whenever I could slice a little time out of the dull roar of things passing by. Me and my four rectangles.

No wireless? The Android is a hotspot. Need to work on a document from the office? All four of the rectangles are synched to one set of files using SugarSynch. The moment the piece of work changes, all of the machines have the new version.

That’s what the future looks like from here. Pick the task appropriate rectangle and use it. Email and directions from the phone. Content for consumption on the iPad. Content production and data manipulation on the notebook.

Ease of input varies by the size of the rectangle. Laptops (and desktops) are good for big projects. I pads are good for small tasks. Phones are best for very pointed data entry and small decisions.

I watched my workflow and thought about Mobile Recruiting. My conclusion is that there’s no there there? There was not the slightest opening in my workflow for the consumption of advertising of any kind. The few bits of text spam I got made me mad.

From the candidate side,

• No candidate will ever build a resume on the phone.
• No candidate is likely to ever make a thoughtful job application on the phone.
• Most job ads are unreadable on big screens; no one will ever read much of them on small screens

Bottom line? Mobile Recruiting is a great way to engineer a flood of ill considered applications that are of lower quality that people are already complaining about? Why? The tool (a phone) is ill suited for the rigors of job hunting. Research is impractical. Cover letters would have to include apologies for the implicit typos.

From the Recruiter’s side?

• The phone is not a good place to evaluate resumes. They are best for smaller chunks of data.
• The phone is good for scheduling (see Tungle) but that is not unique to Recruiting.
• The phone is a bad place to do Boolean searches on Google.
• The phone is a crummy place to write a job ad.
• The phone is a bad place to do a video interview. (Though it might be an interesting place to watch them.)
• The phone is a good place to respond to angry hiring managers with short notes.

All things considered, the only thing a Recruiter can reasonably do with her phone is answer some email.

From the hiring manager’s perspective, the phone is a great way to check up on the errant Recruiter and complain about how long things are taking.

So, would someone please educate me about why there’s so much fuss about mobile Recruiting? I just don’t see it.