This sponsored post is produced by Holly DeMuro, the Hire Expectations Institute Curator at iCIMS.
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.).
- What mobile means to recruiters: Considering this growth in mobile, your career portals have to be mobile optimized if you want to win the war for top talent! Talk to your current technology provider and ask them about their mobile options for your career portal. If they are not able to help you, it may be time to consider another provider (I will resist the urge to insert another shameless plug for iCIMS’ totally amazing mobile-optimized career portals, but I am thinking it).
- What mobile means to job seekers: To make the mobile job application process easier on a mobile device, many companies’ career portals allow you to use a social media profile, such as LinkedIn, to provide your contact information and work history while minimizing manual data entry. Be sure that your social media profiles are always up to date and complete. Further, many companies will still want a copy of your “paper” resume. To accommodate the mobile experience, an increasing number of career portals allow job seekers to upload their resume from their Google Drive or Dropbox cloud storage. With that, it’s a good idea to keep an updated copy of your resume in cloud storage for quick and easy access.
Social media and mobile technology are revolutionizing the job search and recruitment process. These technologies offer job seekers a quick and easy way to get a new job and they offer recruiters a great way to fill vacancies faster than ever before. It is important to consider, however, that technology is only good if you use it the right way. To effectively leverage technology like mobile and social media, you need to have all the facts. As technology and trends in the job market continue to evolve, iCIMS Hire Expectations Institute will continue to provide you with the insight you need to stay on top.
How iCIMS can help
ICIMS is one of the fastest-growing vendors of talent-acquisition software, providing our software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to businesses of all industries and sizes. We provide flexible tools that help businesses attract, screen, and manage the very best talent. Our goal is to help our customers win the war for top talent; to that end, the iCIMS Talent Platform is built with the latest technologies such as video, social media, and mobile responsive design, giving our customers an edge over the competition. To learn more about the iCIMS, call 1-800-889-4422 or take a look at our demo.
Holly DeMuro is the Hire Expectations Institute Curator at iCIMS, a leading provider of innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent acquisition solutions. iCIMS is an Inc. 500 and Software Satisfaction honoree focused on solving corporate business issues through the implementation of easy-to-use, scalable solutions that are backed by award-winning customer service. iCIMS’ Talent Platform, the industry’s premier candidate management solution, enables organizations to manage their entire talent acquisition lifecycle from sourcing, to recruiting, to onboarding all within a single web-based application. With more than 2,000 clients worldwide, iCIMS is one of the largest and fastest-growing talent acquisition system providers with offices in North America, U.K., and China. Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.