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(Photo via Blogging4Jobs)

Lets face it. Mobile is taking over the world. Some may even say, it's replacing the computer. Between, Iphones, Androids, Windows, and the plethora of tablets out there, wouldn't you think mobile recruitment would have been popular by now?

According to JobScience, nearly "7 million people around the world use smart phones to connect with friends, family, and potential employers".  So, if your company wants to focus on recruitment advertising, why haven't you adopted a optimized mobile strategy yet? No really, why haven't you?

JobScience, also reveals that of only 20% of Fortune 1000 companies have mobile optimized websites. That's alarming considering the amount of people who may only use their phone to surf the Internet. If their sites aren't optimized for mobile usage, who's to say they have an app for that?

Well, the most likely do not. One reason may be because not everybody's doing it. A study by iMomentus states that only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have a mobile recruitment app. ONLY 3% YOU SAY? Don't be alarmed because of those 3% some of them are very notable. For instance, GM, PepsicCo, Liberty Mutual, Blackberry, Match.com, Nielson, and GE all have mobile career apps.

So, whom are we missing out on? According to a Potentialpark study reviewed by Mashable, nearly 20% of "job seekers are using their mobile device for career-related purposes", and on top of that 50% of other job seekers can see themselves doing the same. 

These studies and statistics reveal that recruiters are missing a HUGE target market in terms of not just mobile recruiting but brand exposure as well. Brands build trust, trust leads to employers, employers create success. Broaden your options recruiters. Make an app for that!

  Sources:

http://blog.imomentous.com/the-newest-way-of-recruiting-is-on-mobile/

http://www.blogging4jobs.com/social-media/25-companies-mobile-careers-recruiting-apps/

http://blog.imomentous.com/the-newest-way-of-recruiting-is-on-mobile/

Twitter does it again. Updates aim to please advertisers of the world.

Twitter has recently undergone some major changes, for the better. A few weeks ago Twitter released free analytics for all of its users. This is a feature that everyone can use to their advantage. To use the new tool, go to ads.twitter.com, sign in, and click Analytics at the top left. Below is what I found when I reviewed my followers and timeline.

Twitter's newest feature, which I discovered today via TechCrunch  allows users and engagers to see just where else their tweets appear with an embedding feature.

It appears to only be a select few who have uncovered this twitter feature (mostly influential tweeters), but this may be a game changer for digital target marketing for advertisers. 

This picture below (via TechCrunch) shows where the new Twitter update was discovered.

This means that your company can go where no company has gone before. Ingred Lunden points out, "Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform to advertisers hungry to go not just where registered users are congregating, but specifically to where users are logging on, paying attention, and clicking". What do you think of these update? 

This week, some have noticed that Google is testing new ad formats for mobile PPC ads. Mobile Google search results generally show a list of websites with PPC ads at the top and bottom of the page surrounded by a very faint yellow box that also include a small “Ad” symbol with the “i” icon in the corner, as per the below screenshot.

However, Tweeters @adaircameron and @tecnonetblog spotted some new formatting to both the organic and paid mobile search results in the works. The new search results page shows a few changes – the yellow box around ads as been removed and a bright gold, small symbol with the word “Ad” has been added next to the ad’s display URL (the “i” icon still remains in the top right corner), and now both the organic and PPC listings are in individual white boxes that sit on a gray background which makes the ads all look like rectangular buttons, and lastly, the gray background behind the Google logo and search bar has been removed. Here’s a sneak peak of the new format testing, from Search Engine Land:

At this time, we aren’t sure if this new search results page formatting will be pushed out to all mobile searchers (personally, I have yet to see the new format on my iPhone searches) or if it’s simply a test, but it will certainly be interesting to see the results of these changes, if made.

We looked at a number of our clients’ Google AdWords PPC campaigns and found that our healthcare clients see an average of 23% paid traffic coming from mobile devices and non-healthcare clients see a slightly higher average at 29%. With about a quarter to a third of all PPC traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s key that we pay attention to any changes made in the mobile ads results and how that affects our clients’ campaigns, and ultimately, how it affects our conversion rates and costs per application.

One of the top job aggregators, Simply Hired, made a similar change to the format of their PPC Sponsored Jobs and the overall search results pages in the summer of 2012. While we couldn’t find any published information about these changes, we remember that Sponsored Job position inventory was opened up from just a few ad slots on each page to up to 10 full pages of of paid jobs before seeing any organic listings. Also, the colored box around Sponsored Jobs was removed and the PPC jobs were formatted the same as organic jobs with the exception of the word “Sponsored” in the top right corner of the search results and a thin, gray line following the last Sponsored Job in the list of results. We did see an upward trend in many of our clients’ Simply Hired PPC campaigns around the time of these changes, but we can’t say for sure if this was due to the change in Sponsored Jobs formatting or if it had more to do with the change in how the organic jobs compete with the Sponsored Jobs.

We do know that the color of the box around paid ads in search results is often a controversial and a highly-debated topic discussed and tested by search engines and job aggregators alike, and if Google makes this formatting change to all mobile searches, it may be a bit more difficult for searchers to differentiate paid listings versus organic listings among the results. At least that gold “Ad” box pops and may help clear things up. Will this increase or decrease clicks to mobile PPC ads? Will mobile job seekers become more or less aware of the ads in their search results? Will we see similar trends of increased traffic and decreased CPCs like we saw on Simply Hired? Only time will tell.

The use of social media is ever-changing in the recruitment world as the various platforms change over time, and Facebook seems to be continuously modifying to compete with more professional social network sites. Recently, we’ve seen two changes from Facebook that could affect Facebook as a social recruiting tool.

To start, last month Facebook announced that ad images will soon be 3.5 times larger than the previous sizes (changing from 120×120 to  600×350 pixels). And now, a click anywhere on a Facebook ad leads users to the intended landing page whereas clicks previously had to be on the headline link directly. This will give Facebook users a larger space, therefore more opportunity, to click through to a company’s careers site and this could mean higher conversion rates and ROI for Facebook ads geared towards recruitment messages.

Secondly, according to sociobits.org, a new careers-related feature appeared last week on Facebook that allows users to add “professional skills” to their profiles. We have a hunch that Facebook will continue to make these small, yet notable, changes over time to make Facebook profiles include more and more professional, resume-type pieces of information to directly compete with LinkedIn. What does this mean for social recruitment? Now when a Facebook user clicks on one of these professional skills, they are taken to a page that shows their friends with the same or similar skills, related Pages and Groups, and a list of people to potentially connect with that share those skills or interests. Recruiters could start using this Professional Skills section to find qualified candidates right through their own personal networks! This new feature may also be a great tool for referring jobs to others based on skill set. And last, but certainly not least, we expect “Professional Skills” to become a targeting option for Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories, although we haven’t seen this in the ads dashboard yet. If implemented, this will allow employers to push ads and sponsored stories to Facebook users who have specific skills, further pushing the social recruiting competition between Facebook and LinkedIn (as LinkedIn already offers skills-targeting for their ads).

As Facebook constantly makes changes to remain relevant, it seems with these changes their not necessarily ahead of the curve. With LinkedIn already offering skills-targeted advertising options, and as both Facebook and LinkedIn already promoting large-image Sponsored Stories, it doesn’t really seem like Facebook is introducing anything new. As teenager Ruby Karp discusses in her recent article about the lack of sustainability for Facebook as a social network (appropriately named “I’m 13 and None of My Friends Have Facebook“), a great point is brought to the table – the kids of today are shaping what will happen in the coming generations. It’s extremely important that we, as part of the recruitment industry, keep this in mind when forecasting and making predictions about the future of social media use and recruitment since today’s children will be tomorrow’s workforce.

Taking a look at the true professional social network, LinkedIn seems to be in it for the long haul.  We think Adam Wexler from Insightpool says it best:

“LinkedIn possesses an inherent advantage over all of the other social networks: it is a professional network. If you’re a recent graduate pursuing anything in the business realm, I don’t care if your great-grandfather is on the network — you need to be joining him. For this reason and many more, I believe LinkedIn has some great growth ahead of itself as I’ve longed maintained.”