Not long after job boards were unleashed on an unsuspecting world, the folks managing these sites noticed an interesting phenomenon: job seekers would spend a considerable amount of time on the site during their first visit – but then very little after that, and often they didn’t return at all.

As you can imagine, this was distressing to job boards – they needed job seekers to visit their sites to respond to jobs.

Or did they?

Someone had the bright idea of creating ‘job alerts’ - emails that contained links to positions matching a job seeker’s search criteria. In other words, job boards would ‘push’ the jobs to the job seeker.

This was, in my opinion, a brilliant – and brilliantly simple – idea. After all, who really wants to bother with returning to a job site day after day? And what if you mangle your search terms and end up with the wrong jobs?

Jump forward to the present day. Why does Twitter appeal to many job seekers? Because jobs drop into their laps – except that they can be a bit unruly and torrential. A better solution? Ahem….how about job alerts?

Think about it: a job seeker creates a job alert on the job board, company site, or career hub of his or her choice. The job seeker selects the channels for the job alert to use:email; text message; Twitter; RSS feed; and so on. Then the job seeker selects frequency: once a week; once a day; once an hour; all the bleeding time.

It goes without saying that you could create multiple job alerts and use multiple search variables. Right? And it also goes without saying that you can log into your job alert HQ via Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Result? Job seekers get the desired jobs on their mobile device, desktop, or whatever they’re using. Employers get the response they want. Job sites get happy customers.

So…does your job site do this?

All hail the lowly job alert! Hip hip hooray!