It's no secret that I love my iPhone. It's certainly no secret that I'm an avid believer in mobile marketing for recruitment. So I'm sure it was no surprise when early this year I came to the leadership at AT&T and explained to them how strongly I felt that we should create the first employment driven application on an iPhone. And while I was probably guilty of using phrases like, "it's our responsibility" or "it just makes sense that we're the first" - they luckily listened to the more rational side of my business proposal anyway and gave me approval to push forward.

What ultimately hit the iTunes store just this week was a product that was a result of fun innovation, passion, vision and teamwork. I'm proud to have led the AT&T Jobs iPhone application to market and to have had both dirty hands and sweaty brow in getting it out.

So while the timing of the application didn't permit it to be the first employment application, it is still without a doubt, the first employment application created by an employer. In a nutshell it's not only the first iPhone application from an employer that focuses only on that employer's jobs, but it's also tremendously different from ANY other employment app available today.

Allow me to give you a quick walk through and my own review with screen captures...
The entire application is designed with a job seeker in mind - meaning that you won't find any huge corporate spin or an over abundance of buttons and options. Out of the gate we went with a very simple 5 feature approach. A basic homepage, job listings, an event calendar, recruitment videos, and an opt-in form for alerts.

~~~Application Overview~~~

Home
When the application loads you'll find a welcome message inviting you to tap it and be taken to the mobile optimized version of the www.att.jobs career portal. These are pages that have been optimized for the most popular of mobile browsers and provide a company overview, summaries of various job categories, news about employment at AT&T and more. And while the pages were created with any mobile in mind - they look particularly sexy when viewed via the iPhone. So maybe I'm a bit partial... go look for yourself.
Jobs
The jobs icon takes a candidate to a quick and dynamic listing of some of the most popular job categories found on the www.att.jobs career portal. And yes, these categories change based on business needs and hiring trends or activity. After selecting a category, a quick and easy search is done by simply typing in a few keywords or the name of a city or even the abbreviation of a state such as CA or GA.
(a minor bug was found when searching on iPhones using the 3.1 OS - this is cared for in an already submitted update.)
Events
While we're heavy into our college recruiting season the Events icon launches a combined calendar that lists every Recruiter attended event scheduled - and displays them in order of occurrence. For events that are open to the public, job seekers will not only find attendance details but key jobs for that location as well as the ability to have the iPhone provide directions from their current location with just a touch. This. Is. Slick.
Media
We love video. We love it so much that we've been using it to help communicate information about job opportunities for quite a while on our Career Portal. So why wouldn't we put it in our iPhone app? No brainer, right? Out of the gate we launched the application with 7 employment videos that are informative and fun to watch. And yes... there's more of them to come.
Alerts
So of all the things that we made public and visible in the AT&T Jobs application, the ability to join the Talent Network is my favorite. Not just because it's fun to give out monthly prizes like mobile devices, major games like Guitar Hero, GPS navigation systems, etc. , but because I think it's another way for us to tell the job seekers that we're listening. We're listening to what they want and how they want to interact with us.
With just a few taps a passive or active job seeker can sign up for mobile or email alerts related to employment opportunities of interest to them. It's another one of those fun things to say that we're doing unlike anyone else.

So while I'm excited about the things that the AT&T Jobs iPhone application does in its current version, I'm even more excited as we watch the impact the application has with job seekers and the ripple that I hope it creates in the recruiting community.

And as stoked as our team is about the features that we were able to provide upon launch in Version 1... I'm beyond excited about what we're already cooking in version 2. Hey, I'm just sayin'.