Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

The question is: why haven’t these tools and technologies made any significant difference?

If we look at other professions, it is clear that technology is not what makes the real difference. Take building as an example. Using only primitive hand tools, carpenters and masons from Roman times on crafted buildings that are enduring and emulated. The construction methods they used are studied and copied, while their tools gather dust in museums. Chinese accountants used abacuses to keep their books and sailors had glorified rowboats to explore the world’s oceans. It turns out that knowing how to do something is a far more critical skill than what tools are used to do it. Tools do not cause change and transformation, but methods and processes do.

The skills involved in building, accounting, or sailing are what make the difference between success and failure and often between life and death. Those who have improved the methods of building — the ones who figured out how to build skyscrapers and elevators — have contributed more to our progress than have the tools they used.

Technology saves labor and time and often lets us do things we could not do with our own muscles or brains, but it is not a substitute for core knowledge or for understanding how to do something or for human behavior.

And that is most likely why recruiting has not changed. While recruiters have many new tools, they are using traditional processes and methods without much innovation. This is most likely because, despite the hype about a talent shortage, there is really not a major problem finding talented people. If fact, most recruiters would be bored if their job became too easy — and many enjoy the hunt. Innovation usually occurs when there is an unsolvable problem or a major problem or a crisis, and recruiting has yet to run into any of those.

But what could be is still interesting. What would an efficient, updated recruiting process look like? Here are a few ideas that I think might work.

If anyone has already tried them or plans on giving them a try, I would like to hear from you in the comments section.

Idea 1: Stop any branding activities and focus totally on referrals. If you are in a nationwide or global firm with a known reputation, branding is a secondary concern. You already attract people because of your product or service brand and most likely have a pipeline of good candidates. Whenever you have an opening, just let employees know and ask them to use their networks to bring in any additional people you might need.

Referrals are free, fast, and effective. Incentives are not really needed and may actually cause employees to reach out to less-than-optimal candidates in the chance of getting whatever reward your offer. Instead give the employees who refer the best candidates, whether they are hired or not, a title such as “Preferred Referrer” or “Trusted Referrer,” and give anyone they refer priority consideration. This will incentivize others to become a titled referrer and raise the bar on the type of candidates you get.

Idea 2: Use online assessments and reduce interviews. Forget screening interviews, meet and greets, and extensive resume reviews. Instead invest in developing one or two screening tests that can be given online, are scored instantly, and provide both you and the candidate with feedback.

These kinds of screening tools can reduce your workload, improve the candidate experience, and result in much better candidates. The challenge is to develop the right tests that actually screen for the characteristics that are important for the job or for the organization.

There may need to be several tests for different positions or levels, but none of this is more costly or time-consuming than endless phone screens and interviews. I would go so far as to say that recruiters should never interview anyone in person. By implementing online screening and eliminating face-to-face interviews, you could potentially expect a recruiter to handle 20-50% more open requisitions.

There are many firms who can do this for reasonable costs, and the online testing and screening business is growing rapidly. Charles Handler, one of the other writers on ERE, has just released a book cataloging and commenting on most testing services available today.

Idea 3: Use video interviews heavily. Video interviews are a powerful and effective way to do more with less and improve legal compliance.

Video interviews are no longer taboo, and many candidates find them much more effective and less stressful than face-to-face interviews. Face-to-face interviews are expensive and time consuming and most of the time lead nowhere. Probably 75% of all interviews do not lead to an offer because of poor screening and poor candidate qualification. By conducting one live interview that is recorded, many people can view the same interview and evaluate the same responses. This leads to consistency, the lack of which is the greatest legal issue with multi-person, live interviews. By recoding the interview, there is proof that the interviews were done legally and that no discrimination occurred.

Idea 4: Train recruiters and hiring managers thoroughly on closing candidates. Make sure every recruiter and as many hiring managers as possible know how to identify potential acceptance issues and how to overcome objections.

Most acceptance failures are because someone — a recruiter or a hiring manager — did not pick up on signs that a candidate had reservations or issues that would be difficult to overcome: perhaps a reluctant spouse, a nagging doubt about the organization or the project, a desire to stay at their current employer, and so on.

It takes practice and training to notice these things and many recruiters are not well trained to not only notice the potential problem, but to deal with it. I often recommend that recruiters take a traditional sales training class where these skills are and the methods to overcome them are taught.

Idea 5: Communicate with mobile technology and via social media. Getting feedback to candidates regularly and fast is one of the ways to differentiate your organization from other and to get first-mover advantage with a candidate.

Most candidates today are more than willing to receive feedback and updates via their Facebook, LinkedIn, or other accounts. Email is fine, but experiment with other methods that cut down the time you spend and get the word out faster. Hiring managers should consider interviewing candidates using Skype or other tools. You could develop a mobile app to provide feedback or updates.

There are probably at least a dozen more ideas that you could try that would lower costs, improve speed, and provide higher quality candidates. But, then again, by doing it the way we always have, we ensure job security — for a while.

Now, a company called Upstream, in the mobile marketing business, has created an online game for its marketing campaign manager positions. Candidates are led through seven “missions” or questions — that is, after they put in their contact details, including a resume. (A requirement I wasn’t so fond of, as it deters those without one.)

One question — one of the seven missions — asks, “If you were to promote Skype to a general target audience who are not current users, which features would you highlight?”

Upstream has added about 45 people in 2011, and opened offices in Silicon Valley, Rio, and Dubai, and is still hiring. Part of what it plays up to potential customers is its use of games in mobile marketing.

For adidas, an award winner last year, they’re already a big thing.

Craig Larson heads up U.S. recruiting. He started about a year ago, about the same time, he says, that adidas “identified a problem that needed a solution.”

The problem begins with the fact that adidas sends lots of people to trade shows in places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. These people aren’t recruiters, usually — and in fact recruiters sometimes are not welcome at the conventions. They are designers, marketers, buyers, and others there to “push product and get orders,” Larson says. “There’s a lot of deals down there and a lot of passive candidates.” Depending on the event, adidas can send a recruiter or two, but “a lot of times they don’t like us tagging along.”

On top of that, trade-show goers are often with their bosses, and not able to talk jobs.

Using Avature, adidas built a portal to capture some of these passive candidates. If you haven’t heard of Avature — it’s a bit like Jobvite, in that it’s in the “CRM” business — an acronym that may sound familiar but in recruiting many folks consider the “C” to stand for Candidate, not Customer, Relationship Management.

Anyhow, the project was rolled out at a large footwear/apparel event. To drive people to the site, adidas put up a display (see photo above) with a QR code you could scan, and handed out small (3 x 5) cards with the QR code on them. Show attendees could thus discretely take a photo of the QR code and then type their contact info into the portal. The candidate information was collected and divvied up to adidas recruiters by function, like design, for them to contact people.

Larson’s excited about this as a way to build a relationship, a pipeline of candidates, to start talking to people who might be candidates. And, he says, it showed hiring managers that the adidas recruiting team could get to recruits without a lot of recruiters, and without a recruiting event. Says Larson, figuratively: “Basically we have a recruiter on site with this banner.”

He is still working on a full analysis, putting solid numbers on the project. In the meantime, he says, “it was a vast improvement over last year when we didn’t use technology to support us. In the future this will be a cost savings, time savings, and the ROI will continue to grow.”

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

First to college recruiting. Tavish Ledesma is one of the key players on this one. He comes from a software-engineering background, with less than a year on the human resources side. What he found when starting with HR, and going to campuses last spring, was a “laborious process for processing resumes.”

Intel receives 20,000 paper resumes per year in the U.S. “They were were shipped to a Intel shared service center where they were processed,” says Allen Stephens. “The candidate data would not be available in our system for a couple of weeks, resulting in a delay before our candidates would hear back from us.”

Ledesma put together a proposal, with some screen shots, for streamlining that process, and Intel, up to the CIO’s office and the HR VP, bought in.

Among the goals is to help recruiters collect information from candidates, and shorten the time between when a candidate and recruiter meet, and that candidate gets an email from Intel about applying for a job.

Intel’s still refining it, and still piloting it, but basically recruiters, instead of getting paper resumes and writing notes on them, are equipped with iPads. The iPad application (see graphic at left) is used at a career fair or other conference to collect information from a candidate, such as their name, email address, grades, and interests. The recruiter can mark it up with notes, such as whether the person wants a job or an internship.

The information makes it way into the Taleo applicant tracking system, and candidates can hopefully get an email back from Intel as soon as that day, the day they interacted with Intel at a career fair, and not weeks later.

Stephens says “the app allows Intel to reduce our candidate response time by 25 times, and save over 500 hours per year in manual processing.”

Development started in August, and as I mentioned, is ongoing. The biggest challenge right now, with the application having been tested at three different events, is getting a soft copy of a resume entered into the system; in other words, finding the best way way to get additional information from the job candidate added to their profile.

New Mobile App for Candidates

The college recruiting application mentioned above is generally an internal technology — to make life easier for recruiters and in the end, better for candidates. Intel’s also rolling out an application for job candidates who look for jobs with a smart phone, along the lines of ones Autodesk, Pepsi, and others have had built. It’s first being rolled out for Androids, and then to iPhones and iPads.

It took about six months from the first meeting about it to completion, and is still being tweaked as we speak, particularly with respect to the branding, images, and the security features. “We take our brand very seriously,” says Intel staffing channels manager Keith Molesworth. “Especially in the recruiting space.”

Facebook and Other Social Media

When we last off, a year ago, Intel was trying to make its social media recruiting more social, more consistent, and make sure it didn’t fall behind Silicon Valley competitors. Sejal Patel and others are continuing that work, with new wrinkles.

One of those is Google+. Patel partnered with the Social Media Center of Excellence (within the Sales and Marketing Group) to create the Intel brand page, which has multiple circles such as “technology enthusiasts,” “Newsroom,” “Trends,” and a recruiting-focused one, “Life at Intel.”

Meanwhile, as far as search engine optimization of jobs is concerned, earlier this year, Intel started using a tool from an association called DirectEmployers. The tool costs nothing additional for members of the association. Intel is now trying out Jobs2Web on some of Intel’s critical software jobs.

Intel continues to use Twitter, LinkedIn (where it has enjoyed success with a student lounge), and Facebook. When it comes to Facebook — well, that all had gotten a bit unwieldy for Intel, with multiple pages around the world, some even inactive. What it’s doing now is putting jobs tabs on different pages for different countries – UK, Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Russia. Those pages will have feeds from Intel’s careers blog, as well as local career-related events. A company called Vitrue helped create the tabs, modules, and feeds.

The Facebook site is pulling from the Taleo system, so people can search for jobs on Facebook, read the job description, and in the end go to the Intel careers site to apply. Work4Labs helps power the job search. “It’s a cleaner, prettier, branded way to search for jobs on Facebook,” says Patel.

It’s not yet using BeKnown or BranchOut, but was recently approached by the latter and is considering testing it, and others in that field.

Intel is also stepping up its use of virtual events in recruiting. Using a company called ON24, some of Intel’s events are mainly chats, where candidates submit resumes and talk to hiring managers and recruiters about working at Intel. Others are more of the webinar variety, on topics like CV writing — with a question-and-answer period.

Allen Stephens provided stats on a recent event: “Over 650 resumes received during two-hour event; 385 students attended; 10 hiring managers plus multiple recruiters in the chat event.”

Still Cracking the Code

Even with all this going on, even with this being Intel and all, if you talk to the Intel team, you find that it’s sourcing and social media challenges aren’t so different from everyone else’s.

You have your Tiffany Peerys (among the Intel team on video here talking about their recruiting in the spring of 2011) who are adept at the social-media recruiting thing, and you have others who aren’t as enthused. To that end, Intel recruiting leaders in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere are brainstorming some ways to better train people on social media, with that training likely to increase toward the beginning of 2012. It’d also eventually like to have a community manager for each region of the world, rather than so much of it being either run out of the U.S, or ad hoc.

QR codes are a second-generation barcode that allows potential candidates to quickly and directly access supporting materials and websites using only a camera equipped smartphone. QR codes have many uses, but are most often used to direct target audiences to online content that cannot be easily conveyed in print.

You can of course provide a printed URL, but if you have ever tried to enter a long URL into a mobile browser, chances are you wouldn’t do it again.

What Is a QR Code?

The QR in QR code stands for quick response, and although you might not know them by name, you have undoubtedly already seen these one-inch square shaped symbols that look a little like a maze in advertisements, on billboards, and in posters. Don’t let their size fool you: QR codes can be powerful communication mechanisms because they can take candidates directly to customized supplemental recruiting information that might include a website, pictures, videos, narrative information, or point directly to Twitter or Facebook. Organizations that have taken lead in using QR codes for recruiting include Google, the U.S. Army, E&Y, AT&T, Siemens, and Pepsi.

The Many Benefits of Using QR Codes in Recruiting

QR codes were designed to support mobile users, something the recruiting-tools community hasn’t invested a great deal of time in despite the widespread adoption of smartphones. Because many smartphone users are never more than a few feet from their almost-always-on device, mobile will become the platform of choice for recruiting activity. The application to decode a QR Code comes pre-installed on most devices and there are many free Apps for users with a device not pre-installed with one. Potential candidates could be on the subway, reading the paper, or walking down the street and with the push of a button be immediately taken to follow-up information or a job application.

If your recruiting effort is attempting to show off your firm’s innovation or its use of technology, the use of these codes might help to reinforce that message. QR codes can dramatically increase the value and usefulness of print ads, billboards, posters, business cards, and brochures. Because college students are particularly mobile phone dependent, QR codes should be embedded into all aspects of college recruiting.

These codes are also powerful because they easily allow for effective tracking analytics that can identify sources and usage rates. In addition, QR codes can be produced for free and because they are so small, will save space and advertising costs. These codes can also be used for non-recruiting purposes including check-ins and to provide employee, vendor, and customer information.

“Like a picture, a QR Code can replace a thousand words.”

Potential Uses of QR Codes in Recruiting

There are literally dozens of ways in which these codes have been or can be used to provide recruiting information to prospects and candidates. Some of them include:

• Newspaper/magazine ads — to provide follow-up information that can’t fit in the ad.
• In job postings, social media and blogs — they can provide detailed reference or follow-up information without taking up space.
• Referral cards — they can instantly take a referral to an application site.
• Wall posters/stickers — that can be placed on bulletin boards and even on poles.
• Billboards/signage/on vehicles — QR can work even when the picture is taken from a distance.
• Career fairs and college events — they allow an interested prospect to instantly access additional information without having to wait in line or ask a question.
• In text messages — they can be attached to text messages as a picture or they can be used to send text messages.
• Job alerts/calendar events — individuals can sign up for specific job alert notifications and calendar items can be easily saved on a phone’s calendar.
• Direct mail — they can move an individual directly from a paper letter to the Internet.
• In slides — they can direct you to more detailed information from presentation slides.
• Invitations — they can be used to invite people to join talent communities, and to participate in contests or events.
• In retail outlets/at trade shows/on product packaging — they can convert customers into applicants.
• Bus cards/name tags — they can provide instant detailed information about you.
• On T-shirts — they help send a message that your firm is “cool” (Google used them)
• On resumes — applicants can place them in resumes to show work samples.

Possible Issues

There are of course a few downsides related to the use of QR codes. The first is that many recruiters will resist them for no other reason than most recruiters resist any kind of change that involves a new technology. Second, you will most likely get a spotty response from potential candidates because while QR codes have existed for a while, not everyone is familiar with them and others don’t yet have a smart phone with QR reading capability.

Final Thoughts

Although QR codes won’t solve every recruiting problem, they certainly are a quick, cheap, and flexible way to re-energize and make your non-Internet recruiting information approaches more effective. These codes are particularly effective because they support mobile audiences and that allows individuals to act when they are most excited. Soon QR Codes will be as common as embedded hyperlinks that are only effective within electronic messages.

You can test the effectiveness of QR codes for providing contact information by using your smartphone camera to take a picture of the example at the top of this article, or you can create your own QR codes for free by going to a site like http://goqr.me/.

Only 7 percent of corporate career sites are optimized for mobile devices, according to a Potentialpark survey. However, 19 percent of job seekers reported using their mobile device for career activities; 50 percent “could imagine” themselves doing so.

The usage data comes from Potentialpark’s massive annual global survey of students, graduates, and early career professionals. It’s Online Talent Communication Study was completed in June and now, with the 2012 survey underway, the recruitment marketing and research firm says the number of mobile job seekers is already showing “a significant rise.”

“Job seekers are using their mobile devices for job search whether employers like it or not,” explained Julian Ziesing, a spokeman for Potentialpark. “Much like the employer brand, refusing to create a mobile recruiting strategy doesn’t stop employers from having one. It simply becomes one they don’t control.”

Internet-accessible mobile devices can connect to most career sites, whether or not they are mobile-optimized. However, if you’ve ever tried to search for a job on a typical corporate career site, you quickly discovered that it is clunky at best, and at worst, some or all of the search features don’t work. Even where you can search, applying for a job from a mobile device may be impossible.

That becomes a major hurdle for mobile using job seekers, 30 percent of whom say they want to be able to apply for a job while on the go. More important to the mobile job seekers is the ability to search for jobs (57 percent) and get notified of openings (51 percent).

The latter is one of the few things companies can do almost painlessly. All but the most basic career sites allow users to opt-in for email notifications of jobs matching their interests. Far fewer send text messages. But here’s where a mobile strategy would suggest text over email. Text messages have a read rate approaching 100 percent. The open rate for emails on mobile devices may be no better than 30 percent, though the data is fuzzy.

Says the Potentialpark report:

Having a well implemented mobile recruiting strategy can greatly improve the overall candidate experience — giving the job seeker a convenient and location-independent approach to job search, and (2) not having any mobile recruiting strategy can erode the employer brand and limit the number of quality applicants received overall.

That said, recruiting consultant and blogger John Sumser has a wholly different and contrarian opinion about mobile recruiting:

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.

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

It’s 5:30 a.m., and Joe McHenry, a 36-year-old international tax manager who works in New York City, wakes up, checks his e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter activity from his smartphone all before getting out of bed. By 6:45 a.m. he’s dressed and walking to the train station for his 40-minute commute into the city. From the moment he grabs a seat to the moment he steps off the train, his eyes are glued to the four-inch screen of his personal onramp to his digital life and the information superhighway. Throughout the day, he’ll spend another 4.25 hours engaging with the world through it.

Now consider this: you’re trying to recruit Joe McHenry. He has blown off your e-mails, your voicemails, and even your InMails. This morning, however, his friend who used to work for your firm retweeted a link to the job you’re recruiting for, and it appeared on Joe’s Facebook wall. While on the train, Joe’s curiosity got the best of him and he clicked the link. The browser on his smartphone opened and started to load a page from your career site. He waited and waited, but the page just wasn’t loading. He figured, “I’ll try the parent domain instead.” He typed in yourcompany.com and up came your company’s WAP site, nicely formatted and clean. He looked for the link to jobs, but couldn’t find it. Frustrated, he abandoned his curiosity and went back to catching up with his friends on Facebook.

Sound like a poor experience? Only eight of the Fortune 100 have a career site that detects mobile browsers, and sadly, few of them optimize content for mobile visitors. Among those companies that have invested in building a mobile website, jobs content is more often than not missing. An infant-sized handful have done something for the mobile audience. They have built a careers app users can install on their phone or built out a mobile careers site. You can check out the progressive few: Raytheon, Starbucks, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Hyatt, and AT&T.

The New Normal

Joe McHenry’s lifestyle is the new normal.
As of September, 40% of U.S. cell phone users carried a smartphone, and predictions show that by year’s end a majority of the population will have one. Around the world, smartphones are quickly becoming the primary means of engaging via the Internet, with the PC being downgraded to second place. Factor in the lack of IT controls on personal devices and you can see why everything that is personal online will soon be done via mobile. Whether or not your firm blocks Facebook doesn’t matter when you carry Facebook in your pocket. Today, a majority of the traffic to Facebook already comes from mobile devices. According to Richard Cho, Facebook recruiting manager, mobile users are two times more engaged than non-mobile users.

A new Global Mobile Workforce Report from iPass based on input from 3,100 global workers indicated that 91% of those with mobile access to the Internet check in with their digital lives during the unoccupied moments of the day. “Not only were they checking their email first thing in the morning, 38% worked before their commute, 25% during their commute, and 22% worked again on the way home — each and every day. And they didn’t stop when they got home either. For many, work is a never-ending cycle; 37% work each evening — 33% work again when they arrived home, 26% after dinner, and 19% said they work again after they put their children to bed at night.”

A Blunder of Epic Proportions

Think of it. Precisely during the time periods when individuals are the most likely to be free, they don’t have access to mobile-friendly career information. If they find out about an opening from a friend on a social network, in most cases the link provided will bring them back to your ATS, which does nothing to support the mobile user. If they want to watch videos or read blogs, their browser will encounter technical challenge after technical challenge. If they are on an iPhone or Android, they may see your site, but they will be pinching, flicking, scrolling, and getting irritated the entire time. It’s important to realize that mobile-capable candidates aren’t stupid; not providing mobile access is an employer-brand bruiser for most companies, but if you are a tech firm, it’s an employer-brand killer.

“HR’s dirty little secret – you can’t get there from here!”

How Bad Is Your Site?

Among the Fortune 100 mentioned earlier, only one allows you to actually apply from a mobile device. That one is Raytheon. Among tech companies, some of the worst performers include Microsoft, Apple, and RIM, all of whom make mobile operating systems and browsers!

Using the mobiReady testing tool that tests the suitability of site design for mobile devices, you can see just how poorly the recruiting professions effort has been to court the mobile audience. The tool performs numerous tests, but assigns a score of one (horrible) to five (excellent) based on the total experience. Among the Fortune 100 the highest score for the primary career site was achieved by McKesson (AT&T’s site did not redirect the tool to its mobile website or it would have received a 5.0.)

Among the top ten Fortune firms, the scores looked like this (click to enlarge):

Why You Must Embrace Mobile NOW

The dominance of the mobile device has been a trend barreling toward us with considerable speed for some time. I first wrote about it just over three years ago when I proclaimed the mobile phone “The Most Effective Recruiting Communications Platform.” The recruiting profession has had more than ample time to prepare, but the stat’ prove few took action. Some of the reasons you can’t wait any longer to embrace mobile include:

• Mobile communications receive response rates unheard of for other communication channels. Well-designed SMS campaigns can achieve 100%-plus response rates!
• Smartphones provide ubiquitous access to digital communication/engagement tools. Global research by mobile advertisers found that 67% of smartphone users are never more than three feet from their device and NEVER turn it off!
• When people get bored or need a distraction, it’s what they turn to!
• The smartphone does what no other device on your desk can do: it unifies all communications, including voice calls, video calls, text messages, recorded videos, pod asts, social media messaging, email, instant chat/messenger, and Internet content. This range of message options allows you to cater to your prospects’ lifestyle versus forcing them to engage in your administration-centric process.
• The current generation is so hooked on them that messages not accessible from a mobile device may never be seen.
• If you’re targeting innovators and first adopters (both of which prefer Android), and the technology savvy, you have no choice.
• If you’re recruiting for a temporary or contract job, the rapid response rate of mobile makes the mobile platform the ideal choice.
• Personal phones are not subject to idiotic IT policies. The employees of your competitors can engage with while on the job without fear of being snooped on!
• Referral conversations happen in the field. It’s only logical the process should start there!
• As QR codes (quick response) become commonplace, the mobile phone will become critical in driving people to your information.
• If you are successfully messaging or posting jobs on Twitter, you are already aware that your audience is hooked on the mobile platform.
• Nothing shows the candidate quicker that your firm isn’t an innovator or a technology leader than ignoring the mobile phone platform.
• Google has already started to improve the ranking of sites that support mobile in search results over those that do not. Other engines will follow.
• The application capabilities afforded by the smartphone enable a perverse world of opportunity to make the recruiting process personal, local, engagement-centric, media rich, real-time, etc.

A Grander Opportunity

While the vast majority of recruiting professionals are primarily concerned with closing requisitions as quickly as possible, there are a significant portion who also consider the impact of their efforts on the greater productivity of the workforce. If you embrace mobile for no other reason, do it for this one: workers capable of work-shifting — i.e. working while mobile — are more productive, so stuffing your pipeline with candidates who have proven their mobile adeptness will positively impact your firm’s long-term productivity. Don’t take our word for it. Read the iPass Global Mobile Workforce Report and learn that among mobile workers:

• 75 percent worked more hours because of the increased flexibility in when and where they could work
• 55 percent worked at least 10 or more hours each week
• 64 percent felt they were better able to balance their workload with personal commitments
• 54 percent felt their productivity was substantially improved

Final Thoughts

Kat Drum was working as the global employment brand manager at Starbucks (she is now with RIM) when it launched its first mobile e-commerce application which had a tab for Jobs at Starbucks included. While presenting at mRecruitingcamp in September, she indicated that “Starbucks produced hires within a few weeks of launching the app.” While PepsiCo’s efforts are just a few months old, Chris Hoyt, who leads talent Engagement & marketing, presented evidence of mobile’s value at the same conference, juxtaposing PepsiCo’s mobile efforts against more traditional sourcing channels. Hoyt elaborated, saying that the early evidence justifies the initial investment and that mobile will be a considerable part of PepsiCo’s strategy for sometime.

While a few leading-edge firms (check out Verizon, Fidelity, HCA, and the U.S. Army in addition to those already referenced) have tried the mobile platform, most recruiting leaders have delayed the decision to “go mobile.” The lack of action can be attributed to ignorance about what going mobile would require, lack of funding and lack of desire to find it, general apathy, and lack of support from the ATS community. But the time to realize the cost of not going mobile far exceeds the cost of doing so is upon us. The mobile workforce is the future, and the future is what most firms try to dominate!

Matt Lamphear, senior vice president of interactive products at the recruiting ad agency, said that TMP looked at what job boards and others — including TMP itself — were doing with job listings, and realized they weren’t quite there yet. Job listings were being optimized, but they weren’t really being — I’ll sort of coin a word here — mobilized. Says Lamphear: “There’s nothing mobile-friendly about six paragraphs of text.”

So what TMP’s doing is taking your job listings, and parsing out just key information like skills and years of experience, like you see in the graphic above (click to enlarge). You can include other information in the job listing: video, for example, that’s specific to that job. There’s also geographic information; you can figure out how long the commute would be.

Right now, with the application just launched, no one has bought it yet, though one large client is in beta. The cost will vary, depending on what else you have going on with TMP.

Lamphear says the recruiting field, as I’ve mentioned, is still figuring out how mobile phones will be used by job candidates. “What is ‘mobile apply’? That’s really an unknown in our industry,” he says. “The industry standard is to send it yourself and a friend” — meaning that right now, people often use smart phones as a first step, going to their laptop or desktop later.

I asked if applying right from a phone is what’s next. “It’s inevitable,” Lamphear says.

For now, as you see in the graphic at left, the job candidate can apply using their phone, put in some brief information, and later get an email asking them to enter some more information in the applicant tracking system. “At the minimum,” Lamphear says, “the client hasn’t lost the candidate.”

1. It’s about them. Using a mobile phone and a mobile phone application, Offner says, have to be a no-brainer or people will bail. “Make it easy. Let’s capture them and not let them go to waste,” he says, referring to potential employees using smart phones.
2. There are two Internets. There’s the web and the mobile web. Says Offner with a grin: “You either suck on one of them and are pretty good on the other, or you’re pretty good on both.”
3. Know your audience. “You have one today,” he says. “Start catering to them.” Hertz, he notes, gets the importance of mobile marketing when it comes to consumers, and should extend that effort to recruiting. “I love that site,” Offner says. “I can rent a car in a minute. I just can’t wait to rent cars because it’s so easy. They need to apply that same technology to recruitment. Anyone who rents a car could work for them.”

With all that in mind, Charles Purdy, from Monster, speaking at a conference on mobile recruiting a few minutes ago in San Francisco, gave some advice for those corporations looking to put career information on smart phones:

Purdy also shared a few stats from Monster that it’s learning from its smart phone users.

• The most common keyword for job searches is “sales.” That’s followed by the keywords marketing, IT, manager, retail, healthcare, and accounting.
• Mobile users of Monster’s iPhone app behave differently from those who go to Monster.com. Visitors to Monster’s mobile app visit 42% more often than visitors to Monster.com. But they spend much less time (66% less) in the app than on Monster.com. (I think Sodexo’s finding something different in some early data it has on its mobile job-seekers, who are spending more time during mobile visits than the main career site visitors do.)
• As compared to Monster.com users from computers, mobile users are a bit more likely to be male, earn $75,000-99,000, are likely to be employed and thus more passive candidates, and more likely to have graduate degrees. Purdy notes that these stats are likely to change — fairly quickly.

Burnett emailed to say: “The digital world is globally moving at a huge pace to mobile Internet. The explosion of the smartphone and tablet is taking over the pockets of the world and will over take desktop web in 2013. The recruitment industry took 15 years to migrate from printed media to Internet media. Recently the impact of social media has provided innovation in recruitment and a new level of community driven and web-driven hiring outside of the traditional job board. Disappointingly employers have failed to maximise the mobile web and mobile apps.

Given the intrinsic partnership between social media and mobile web, employers around the world must recognize the value being missed on mobile. The attached infographic illustrates the opportunity and the failure to adopt mobile recruiting solutions.”

Burnett’s with me at a mobile recruiting conference up in San Francisco.

If you’re curious, by the way, about the stat you see about 8 out of 100 corporate careers sites — that was a study to see whether the corporate career sites of the Fortune 100 determine if your browser is on a mobile device, and then serve you up mobile-optimized content. It’s a 1-5 scale, and Burnett says that “the fact that the observed average score is so low means that virtually all career sites are designed specifically for people sitting behind a desktop with a broadband connection.”

The “Chief Technology Office” at Citi wanted to deliver the application before the mid-September recruiting season began. The team — mostly recent grads – worked with recruiters on the concept, prototype, and final product to get it done in less than a month.

Using the app, students at select schools see a list of nearby Citi recruiting events (there are 156 upcoming events at 72 locations); get a Twitter feed from Citi; get directions to events; view “day in the life” videos, and more. Right now, it covers North America, but will later include other events in other parts of the world. Citi’s also working on making the application available on other smart phones.

Citigroup is cutting costs and limiting hiring, but a spokeswoman says the firm has “added talent in businesses and regions that are targeted for growth.”

She offered five reasons for her thesis, with volume and the externalization of Facebook’s social graph as the main movers. Ordioni may be right.

Time will tell. In the meantime, there is an elephant in the room and its name is Google+. Launched late in June, it has already surpassed 25 million visitors, a rate of adoption far exceeding the growth curve of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or MySpace.

At last count, the service was growing at the unrivaled rate of about 1 million visitors a day, a number which does not include mobile users. Despite some conflicting reports, engagement with the site was increasing at double-digit rates.

How sustainable this will be is certainly open to question, even if those Google+ buttons are showing up everywhere. A Forbes post pointed out that few people are socializing there yet. “Most of those who have gone there have found it to be an empty room.”

Part of the initial allure of Google+ was exclusivity. You had to be invited to join. Now, you don’t. Google also leveraged its immensely popular Gmail service, integrating it with Google+ so that Gmail users get to jump start their social network.

Certainly, there’s no guarantee of success. Google’s other forays into social media — Groups, SidiWiki, and Orkut in particular — never gained much traction. However, there are some significant differences in how Google is approaching social networking that make Google+ worth watching, and joining. And chief among these is that Google+ is flexible and versatile.

I’m not going to detail in any depth what I consider to be its greatest virtue and value: Google+ Circles. The accompanying piece does an excellent job of explaining Circles, how to use them, what their value is, and even some of the pitfalls.

For the purposes of this primer on Google+ I’ll only note that Circles lets you segregate your “friends” and contacts in a logical manner.

The problem with Facebook is that everyone is a friend with the same access and privileges to your profile and wall as your mom. Ditto at LinkedIn.

The reality is that Facebook friends include close, intimate, friends; and social friends; and casual acquaintances; and even a few people recommended by other friends who would otherwise be strangers.

Recognizing this social hierarchy, Google+ enables you to put people into whatever buckets you choose. Communicate with one person, one circle, a few circles, or everyone.

Now, instead of switching among LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for fun, Google+ offers a single go-to location. It was this ability to categorize acquaintances and contacts that makes StartWire such a desirable tool for job-hunters.

The advantages for recruiters should be obvious: Circles are your various pipelines, giving you a freedom the other sites just don’t.

But Google+ offers more. It connects with Google Docs so you can link out to whatever kind of document you want, including a resume, a whitepaper, exclusive listings, or something you don’t necessarily want to post on Plus’ equivalent of a status update.

Its Hangouts tool is video conferencing for one-to-one or multiple-user conversations. It’s mobile enabled, so you’re not tethered.

Need to message everyone in a Circle so they’ll get into Hangouts at the same time for a chat? Then use Huddle, instant messaging for your Circles.

Sparks is Google’s version of LinkedIn’s news feed, only broader and more flexible. Pick your subject, Sparks creates a feed that becomes a channel on your Google+ profile. Click the channel and see what’s there. Then share it as you want.

Everything is mobile enabled. Or maybe it was all built for mobile and is desktop enabled. Either way, everything works smoothly on Android phones (no surprise there). One especially nice touch is the Instant Upload, which adds photos you take with your phone to a private album in the cloud.

Getting started with Google+ is a snap, especially if you already have a Google account. Just log in and you can start building a network right away; simply import your Gmail contact list by clicking on the “Friends” link. Sort these contacts into whatever groups are right for you. Contacts can be placed into more than one group.

Complete as much of your profile as you want or, if you already have a Google profile, import it, and off you go. Google Profiles, by the way, is disappearing into Google+.

Google is adding features and versatility to Google+ on a near weekly basis. Games got added last week. And soon, Google will be adding services for businesses.

Matt Jeffery, who wrote that article on ERE that went quite viral, says his employer, Autodesk, is among the leaders in the mobile race. More on Jeffery and what his company is unveiling in a minute; first a look at how we got to this point.

A page from the Autodesk iPad version

What the amorphous term “mobile recruiting” has meant to many people so far is encouraging candidates to send a text message companies about jobs, like UPS has done, or the tinkering around with a careers website to make it show up better on smart phones, like companies such as Hyatt have done. Randy Goldberg and the Hyatt team are looking into having candidates submit some quick information on themselves using a cell phone, so they wouldn’t have to type in a whole resume or application. But right now, Goldberg believes that having candidates actually apply for a job using their cell phone would be quite a hassle for a candidate.

Most everyone tends to agree — including many folks you may have heard of who have an interest in mobile recruiting, people like Geoff Peterson, Craig Fisher, Gordon Lokenberg, and Chris Russell.

Lokenberg has helped Deloitte-Netherlands with its mobile recruiting. “There are a lot of apps out there that are mostly shortcuts to an Internet career site of the company,” he says. “That makes it hard to navigate.”

“The technology’s not 100% there,” says Peterson. “You’d have to have your resume already loaded up online and have a link to share, or something else like that. In theory (applying straight from a mobile application) can be done for sure, but do I see a lot of being done now? No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen promise from a few different companies,” says Fisher. “But I’ve never seen a working product yet.”

Many of the applications out there are for certain groupings of people, like Lokenberg’s application created in 2009, which works only for companies that are a part of his database, and is called “Shake Your Job.” Or, Monster’s mobile application, for candidates to apply with the Monster accounts. LinkedIn says it does not yet have an “apply now with LinkedIn” mobile-phone application; Russell believes that in general, as LinkedIn makes its moves, it “should speed up the innovation around mobile applying.”

Anyhow, multiple recruiting departments I’ve talked to over the last few months are working on this, with help from various technology vendors. Among those many vendors is a small husband-wife Ohio consultancy working on an “apply now” mobile application, whose work is so private that it doesn’t want its name to be mentioned.

Pepsi, one of the innovators in the mobile arena, was aggressively working on an apply-with-a-cell-phone project, the company told me in the spring, though a spokeswoman tells me it’s not there yet. A little-known UK firm called AllTheTopBananas is its vendor of choice, a company that raves about the success of Pepsi’s mobile efforts to date. AllTheTopBananas has only about 13 employees, mostly developers. It started off in April 2007 as a job aggregator, sort of like a British version of Indeed or SimplyHired in the U.S.

AllTheTopBananas notes that “from the first 60 days from the apps going live, a soft launch only in the U.S., with the apps only being featured in only two places, on their careers website and in the app stores, PepsiCo had received over 3,500 downloads. Out of the 3,500 downloads, 85% of the candidates had job alerts set up on their device for targeted jobs they are interested in. When tracking the candidates who came from their apps, they have hired two new employees and have 10 in the recruitment process. Again, this was within the first 60 days of launch.”

Sodexo, not yet naming the vendor it’s working with, expects to launch its mobile application in about a month, allowing candidates to search and apply for jobs on their phones.

For Sodexo, among the challenges has been the three types of candidates in its current system (internal candidates, external candidates, and Sodexo Alumni) with three different experiences. “This has been a complicated process,” says Sodexo’s Arie Ball, “but in the end we expect candidates, including our internals with simple sign-on requirements, to be able to apply from their mobile device and answer screening questions. I believe we will have the only app with access from three unique portals to offer different candidate experiences.”

And that brings us to Jeffery, who started talking to the same company that’s working with Pepsi, AllTheTopBananas, when Jeffery was working at EA. Jeffery took a job at Autodesk in March and AllTheTopBananas began work on a mobile application for Autodesk, a project that took about three months. Jefferies says Autodesk’s application will be a “game-changer” and may be available as soon as this week on Android-system phones.

Jeffery believes the Autodesk application will be the first where people can apply directly from the phone without a resume. But, he says, that’s the least of it. Far more importantly, Jeffery says, is that the application is a “one-stop shop” to Autodesk tweets, Autodesk YouTube videos streamed through the application, Facebook wall comments, a gallery of work by Autodesk employees on the company’s software, and more. He wants to engage people, excite people, make them inspired about Autodesk, and believes the application does just that, more than just being practical or functional.

But back to the practical: candidates visiting Autodesk’s careers pages on a mobile phone will be asked if they want to download the cell phone application. They can search (see scrollable file at the bottom of this post) for Autodesk jobs with their mobile phones, and can view them on a map. Then, after downloading, the “push notifications” feature saves the previous search created by the jobseeker to the phone, so when Autodesk has a job that matches the saved search, the jobseeker is sent a text message letting them know.

So if they search for, say, San Francisco engineer jobs, even if they don’t type any information in about themselves, Autodesk will push future job openings to them through the application on their phone. If they’re interested in applying, Autodesk will ask for candidates to enter only basic information, such as name, current position, and contact details from their phones. On its end, Autodesk will need to then go in and put that information into its applicant tracking system. And, it’ll contact that candidate later to ask the candidate, perhaps now from their desktop or laptop, to enter some more complete information in the Taleo system, beyond what had been captured during the brief mobile phone visit.

This is all phase I, Jeffery says. Phase II will include more content, more “stickiness” and “gamification.” Autodesk’s application doesn’t include the segmentation I mentioned earlier that Sodexo is working on (internal employees, external employees, and alumni).

AllTheTopBananas, meanwhile, is working or has worked on mobile applications for other major big names including Nestle, RIM (Blackberry Careers), Match.com, and Oracle. Three major multinationals, one based in the UK and two in the U.S., are considering signing on with the mobile-app maker. Each company wants something different built; not surprisingly, AllTheTopBananas’ Commercial Director Cristian Bradshaw tells me the firm is “non-stop busy.”

Autodesk Careers on iPhone

A Jobvite survey out this morning says 89 percent of the respondents to its poll (most of them not Jobvite customers) said they are either already using some form of social media in their recruiting or will in the next year. They are also having success; 64 percent said they’ve actually hired people through a social network.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has followed the development of social media. From their roots as a teenage clubhouse, social media networks today have become so ubiquitous and so much a part of American life that half of all adults use at least one of the sites. Pew Research Center says that last year, 48 percent of those over 35 are on a social network.

Facebook is far and away the most popular network. Pew says 92 percent of everyone using a social network use Facebook. No wonder then that 47 percent of North American companies are spending money to reach Facebook’s 700+ million users via PPC. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of businesses — Facebook doesn’t release the actual number of the so-called Fan Pages — have set up sites.

Smaller in number, LinkedIn however has a better-educated demographic. It’s members are older and better educated; 75 percent hold a bachelor’s or graduate degree. On Facebook, the equivalent percentage is 35.The average age on LinkedIn is 40, versus 38 for Facebook. However, there are more early-stage career participants on LinkedIn. It has 36 percent of those 23-35 versus 32 percent for Facebook.

“Social media tools are one of the top three most powerful recruiting tools, along with referral programs and mobile technologies,” said no less an authority than Dr. John Sullivan.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, social media, referrals, and mobile usage have a close, symbiotic relationship. A third of all American adults have a smartphone, says a just out Pew survey, and 87 percent of them use it to access the Internet or read email. Two-thirds of them do so every day. A Google survey reports that almost half the smartphone owners use them to access a social network at least once a day.

As a result, recruiters have been taking advantage of that capability using custom apps, tweets, or vendors to make it easy for company fans, employees (who, on Facebook, are fans), and followers to refer jobs to their own friends and followers.

With 70 percent of the respondents telling Jobvite that referrals are a better fit, it’s no surprise they reported hiring 1 in 10 of them vs. 1 in 100 of other applicants.

Not all networking occurs online, Right Management reminds us. The ManpowerGroup unit says its own study of its almost 60,000 individual transition clients over the last three years found that 4 in 10 found their job through networking. Last year, 41 percent used traditional networking to make the connection that led to their job. Only 4 percent got their job purely through an online network.

Job boards, according to Right Management, continue to hold their own, accounting for 25 percent of the jobs found by the firm’s transition clients. That’s also what CareerXroads’ annual Source of Hire survey found.

While the study didn’t include a specific social networking category, it did find that more than half the companies use social media exclusively or as a significant part of their direct sourcing programs.

Jobvite, of course, is one of the growing number of vendors that automate much of the mechanical parts of social media recruiting. It focuses on referrals from employees whether or not they are on a social network, and from fans and company followers who are.

Bullhorn, a technology powerhouse in the staffing space, has been pushing into social media in a big way. Monday, it released Bullhorn Reach from beta, four months and 10,000 registered users after launch. As I detailed a few months ago, Reach does a lot of the same automating and posting of jobs to social sites that other services do, but it also tracks what the people in your network are doing and alerts you to the possibility they may be preparing to “go active” in their job search.

How about texting prospects from your personal phone? Or tweeting out a note to your talent community? Or downloading a spreadsheet or document to your flash drive so you can work on it over the weekend?

All of this is so routine you may be wondering why I’m even bringing it up. Well, it may be more routine than you suspect; 95 percent of information workers use at least one personally purchased device for work, according to a study by IDC/Unisys. The average number of consumer devices used for business by workers in a day? Four.

The big deal about this is that most companies haven’t caught up to what’s going on in the workplace. A 2009 study by Robert Half Technology found more than half of companies block access to one or more sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Only 19 percent allowed access for business purposes.

Remarkably, a CareerXroads survey about the same time found 35 percent of recruiters and hiring manager were blocked from social media sites.

Ignoring the wisdom of blocking, what the IDC/Unisys survey shows is the disconnect between policy and reality. What does it matter if IT blocks access to any site if an employee can simply use their own tools to access a site? Workers report using laptops, smartphones, and the like twice as frequently as employers think.

Unisys is a networking and IT infrastructure company, so its focus in commissioning the survey was to alert businesses to the ubiquity of personal devices in the workplace and the impact that has on security and IT support. It calls the growth in consumer devices in the workplace a “fourth wave of corporate productivity.”

However, the report should also serve as a wake-up call to HR — and that doesn’t mean adopting or broadening a policy to limit personal computing devices. As one part of the report notes, employees feel strongly enough about the quality of the technology and how it is supported, that it’s an important factor in taking a job.

Whether anyone but an IT prospect would turn down a job because of the tech tools is debatable, but when companies have policies that don’t mesh with reality, it’s a problem. Another example? Despite 78 million smartphones in use in the U.S., fewer than half of employers allow workers to use them to access business systems. Now wonder then that workers give employers below-average marks for support.

What’s the point here? If your company is one that limits access to some or all external sites or otherwise has a policy that is easily controverted by the use of personal devices, it’s time to fix it. As the CareerXroads survey found, only 20 percent of the policies were written by HR. But 100 percent of them will sooner or later involve HR.

Considering that you are among the information workers using your personal device — perhaps even in a way that, if it were company property, might be in violation of the policy — isn’t now a good time to propose updating that policy to conform it with reality?

In August 2008 Dr. John Sullivan posted an article about recruiting trends for 2009 about the importance of mobile-accessible corporate careers sites. We all know how important mobile accessibility is, yet only a few companies are truly optimizing the application experience for mobile. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

1. Search for your company name and careers on your mobile device; for example, “hyatt careers.” Your own career site should be right on top of the list. Click this link. What do you see? Most of you will see a very small version of your full career web site. A few of you will see your company’s mobile site appear but without any career links or career information. Not a single Fortune top 10 company to work for has their site mobile optimized. I’m guessing a lot of people read about the Fortune list on their mobile devices. I wonder how many potential candidates were missed when they could not easily access career information for these companies.
2. Open up your company’s main web site on a mobile device. Many companies do have a mobile version of their main web site. Where is the career link? We all fought hard to add career links to our company’s main sites years ago; get your careers link added here as well.
3. For those of you who have optimized your job postings for search engines: Search for one of your jobs on your mobile device and then click on the link. Do you see a very small version of your ATS career portal or a mobile optimized version of the job that can be read and shared with others?

Creating an optimized version of your web site should be simple and relatively inexpensive. Keep the content simple and focus on the most important content. At Hyatt our site allows a potential candidate to search for jobs, view mobile video from YouTube, discover ways to connect with us through social media, and learn about our culture. Most ATS systems do not yet offer mobilized versions of their career sites, but many job SEO vendors can easily do this for you.

Just like your main career site, obtaining analytics is simple. At Hyatt we have thousands of people visit our mobile career site every month and over six thousand monthly visits to our mobile job search page. AT&T and Sodexo offer a great mobile experience as well.

In the U.S. over 300 million people have a mobile phone. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere. Don’t leave your mobile viewers stranded, start mobilizing your career content.

And now would be a good time to start thinking that way. Just last week the Pew Research Center reported that 85 percent of Americans own a cell phone vs. 76 percent who have a computer. Among the 18-29 year group, 96 percent own a cell phone.

Pew didn’t report the percentage of smartphone usage in this latest report, but earlier this summer another Pew survey found that 40 percent of adults use their phone to access the Internet, IM, or email.

That report also found cell phone use for things other than voice communications were higher for Blacks and English-speaking Latinos. Cumulatively 87 percent of the two groups own a cell phone versus 80 percent for whites. Half (51 percent) of the Latinos surveyed use their phone to access the Internet, while 46 percent of Blacks do. The survey found only 33 percent of non-Hispanic whites do.

Part of the explanation may be that Blacks and Latinos own computers at lower rates than do whites; 67 percent of Blacks and 70 percent of Latinos own a computer compared to 79 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Obviously this has implications for diversity recruiting and for meeting the needs of a diverse workforce. Indeed, in many ways recruiting was ahead of the mobile trend. The first use of mobile by recruiters was SMS to alert candidates to opportunities. Candidates still had to access the posting via a computer to get the details and to apply. Today, job alerts are commonly sent via Twitter. It’s a feature offered by all the largest job boards and most of the major company career sites.

So sophisticated has mobile recruiting become that a job-seeker tweeted an interesting possibility can access the listing and even apply entirely by smartphone.

Then there’s the social networking aspect. comScore says that 74 percent of smartphone users accessed a social network with either an app or by browser. That’s practically a dead heat with search (73 percent). One telling data point that recruiters should be mindful of in their social media strategy: 31 percent of all smartphone users who access a social network did it via an app; 43 percent used their browser.

Earlier this month CareerBuilder announced an expansion of the mobile services it first launched two years ago. iPhone users, who account for 1.6 million searches on CareerBuilder and 115,000 job applications monthly, now will see jobs in their field of interest near where they happen to be at any given moment. They’ll also be able to actively search for nearby jobs, apply for them and view their application history, even create a new resume.

Android users also get many of the same capabilities. They can now search for jobs, use the advanced search functions, including geo-location, apply, check their application history, and create a resume, among other functions.

If you have any doubt about the market for mobile uses, CareerBuilder said it will build mobile career sites for its corporate clients. A mobile site is different from a typical website in that it has been optimized for viewing on small cell phone and smartphone screens.

The announcement about this new service says: “Recruiters can post jobs through their smartphones and leverage company employees as mobile ambassadors. When employees access the site through their mobile device and email jobs to contacts, it becomes hard-coded as a referral that the company can track. “