Over the last couple of years mobile recruiting has been on a steady incline. But while some companies are jumping in with both feet, for every early adopter there is another 100 companies still on the fence.  Most of what you hear about are the statistics regarding the number of smart phones being purchased and the percentage of overall web traffic that is coming from mobile devices. And while those statistics are impressive and in many cases astonishing, the real question boils down to whether or not job seekers are actually looking for jobs with their mobile device. I have had conversations with many “fence sitters” about this, and the sentiment is usually goes something like this:

“We have been looking at our web stats and while they say mobile web traffic is over 10%, we are only seeing about 5-6% on our career site. Should I really worry so much about such a small group?”

This is very short sighted thinking. Here’s why:

This is not just about solving a problem for the few mobile job seekers you are currently seeing, it is about opening a channel that did not previously exist.  It is a little like the advent of Internet recruiting in the mid 1990′s.  I was one of the first customers of CareerMosaic (the first web based job board), and as soon as we  listed all of our jobs on the internet, we had a gold rush of candidates. It was because there was a rapidly increasing population of candidates exploring the web, and so few destinations for researching jobs.

I think this same dynamic is happening today on the mobile web.  iMomentous is currently hosting mobile career sites for more than 100 companies and to date we have tracked data on more than 1.5 million mobile job seekers on our platform.  I decided to take a look at our data to see if I could prove it, and low and behold the data tells the story. Companies who are implementing mobile web career sites are seeing a huge spike in traffic. The image above is just one example showing an increase of over 1,800% year over year mobile career site visitors for one company.

If you think all you have to worry about is the 5% traffic you are currently receiving. You are missing the boat.

Over the course of the next month or two I will be digging deeper into our data to identify additional trends, such as % of candidates applying, time per visit, page views per visit, device preference, etc., as well as some analysis by industry. Stay tuned…