What job seekers and recruiters need to know about the social and mobile job search

Technology is growing at incredible speeds and changing the world around us more every day and these advancements are ushering in significant changes in the employment landscape. As everyone scrambles to adapt, recent research from the iCIMS Hire Expectations Institute uncovered some significant technology disconnects between recruiters and job seekers in the world of mobile and social recruiting.

Social media

Despite that social media is increasingly used in recruiting, many businesses are actually struggling to identify a return on investment. What's more, most job seekers still are not sure how to leverage social media in their job search. With these challenges in mind, we wanted to develop a better understanding of social recruiting and social job seeking behaviors in hopes of identifying trends that might bridge those gaps., The iCIMS Hire Expectations Institute analyzed data from over 60,000 jobs posted on social media and surveyed 700 job seekers about their use of social media in the job hunt. The trends that emerged were enlightening to say the least. One of the most significant findings from our research was that 51 percent of all job openings advertised via social media were posted to Twitter. But our job seeker survey showed that there is a great divide between recruiter's social media usage and job seeker's expectations. Our survey found that only 1 percent of the job seekers think of Twitter as a place to find jobs.

What social recruiting means to recruiters: To master social recruiting, improve your return on investment, and attract the best candidates you must employ a multi-channel social recruitment strategy. This means that you cannot rely on any single social media platform to distribute your jobs effectively. You must leverage all of the top social media platforms including Twitter, linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ so you can be sure that your message is reaching the best candidates.

What social recruiting means to job seekers: While many of you didn't know it before, this should be your wake up call. Twitter has a lot of jobs! If you are new to Twitter, this may seem a bit overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be hard. Start out by creating a professional-looking profile, then start by follow companies that interest you. For those who are more experienced with Twitter, hashtags are your new #BFF. Try searching #jobs and you will see that there are a ton of opportunities waiting for you.

Mobile

Another major change we've seen is a dramatic upswing in job seekers' use of mobile technology in the job hunt. According to an analysis of the traffic coming to career portals in 2013, including over 200 million job seekers' visits, candidates visiting companies' career portals using a mobile device has increased by approximately 44 percent in just one year. While I personally think that is impressive enough, the story is even bigger than that. We took our analysis a step further and looked at the quality of the visitors in terms of bounce rates and conversion from “just looking” to actually applying for a job. The results were staggering. In just one year, career portal's bounce rates decreased by 81 percent and candidates converting from “just looking” to actually applying for a job using their mobile devices increased by over 2,000 percent. (Yes, I said 2,000!) Despite the fact that more and more candidates are obviously expecting a mobile application experience, still relatively few employers are leveraging mobile optimized career portals (excluding, of course, iCIMS' customers who all benefit from our free mobile-optimized career portals. And, yes, that was totally a shameless plug.).