In this competitive market for talent, it is imperative that employers be at the forefront of what job seekers find accessible. With today’s emerging technologies job seekers have come to expect a more interactive experience when it comes their job search. In order to meet the needs and desires of top talent, employers have to meet them halfway.  The smartest employers are taking advantage of today’s emerging media to connect with job candidates where they work and play, and deliver a more interactive and engaging job seeker experience.

Two forms of emerging media employers need to take advantage of right now are mobile and online video technology. Not only are mobile and video technologies surprisingly easy to implement into your overall recruitment efforts, but they are a must for any employer who hopes to remain competitive in the new recruitment landscape.

Mobile: The New Desktop
According to the latest findings from Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Americans currently own cell phones, nearly half of whom (44 percent) use their mobile devices to get access to the internet. This finding highlights the opportunity mobile devices offer employers to reach job seekers anywhere, at any time. The opportunities to use mobile technology for recruiting are vast, ranging from mobile-friendly websites that enable easy job searches on the go; to quick response (QR) codes that point smartphone users to job listings; to text alerts informing candidates about recruiting events and opportunities.

Regardless of size or industry, every company needs to take advantage of mobile recruiting opportunities. Increasingly, job seekers are using their mobile devices to receive job alerts, search jobs and research companies. It won’t be long until this behavior is commonplace, and those companies that do not embrace this technology are losing out on candidates every day.

Video: An Underutilized Advantage
For all of its power to influence and engage people, video is one of the most underutilized recruiting tools out there today. One thing CareerBuilder has seen consistently throughout our 15 years of research on job seekers is their desire to work for companies that care about their employees, work for the greater good and are at the forefront of innovation. Video enables companies to get this message across better than any other medium, because it enables candidates to really see and hear what the true employee experience is like. The evidence supports this finding, too: According to CareerBuilder internal data, job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than postings without video. On average, CareerBuilder customers receive a 34 percent greater application rate when they add video to their job postings. At the same time, only 10 percent of job postings include video, underscoring a major opportunity for employers to take advantage of this technology and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Dispelling the Myths of Emerging Media
Change can be intimidating, but companies that fail to embrace these emerging media are only cheating themselves out of the opportunity to reach the growing number of qualified candidates who utilize this technology for their job searches. If what’s holding you back is the fear that implementing these technologies is too expensive or simply more trouble than they’re worth, consider the following popular misconceptions about emerging media.

Myth 1: It’s expensive. It’s surprisingly inexpensive to send text messages, create QR codes or create a mobile-friendly career site. Likewise, video is also inexpensive to produce, and it can be as easy as creating a video yourself and posting it (for free) on YouTube. It may not be the most polished video, but it’s a way to start the process and see how much feedback it generates.  From there, you might decide to invest in a more streamlined production process to get an even better return. Implementing mobile and video recruiting efforts can be an investment, but when you look at the return, cost should be an afterthought.

Myth 2: It’s too complicated. Mobile technology can feel like somewhat of a black hole for employers; however, integration with mobile devices is surprisingly simple, and the time it takes to build a mobile website is minimal. The same can be said for video. As mentioned above, uploading video onto any online platform – from a video-sharing site like YouTube to the company career site – is increasingly easy.  When in doubt, consult a third party expert to help you navigate these technologies for the best possible ROI. You won’t regret it.

Myth 3: It’s a trend. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it is that emerging media, such as mobile technologies, social networking and video, is not going away. Consider the following statistics:

• In 2010 alone, the worldwide mobile phone market grew by 18.5 percent.
• More than 5 billion text messages were sent on a daily basis in the U.S. in 2010
• In the last quarter of 2010, smartphone sales surpassed that of PCs, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
• During the course of 2010 CareerBuilder saw over 400 percent growth in job searches on our mobile career site, and the number of job seekers storing resumes on their phones using CB’s iPhone App increased by over 350 percent.
• Web pages with video are 53 times more likely than pages with just text to show up on the first page of Google results
• Internet video is now 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic, and will reach 62 percent by the end of 2015.

These are just a few of the findings that underscore both the reach and power of emerging media, as well as the need for employers to adapt their recruiting efforts to keep up with mobile usage trends. As these technologies become the norm for candidates as they search for jobs and research companies, employers need to adjust their recruiting efforts accordingly to remain competitive. In other words, you might not be taking advantage of emerging media, but your competitors are. Don’t get left behind.

Andrew Streiter is an Area Vice President at CareerBuilder, LLC, where he is responsible for developing human capital strategies for organizations ranging from Fortune 1,000 companies to mid-sized businesses throughout the US.

It is easy to come across the recommendations that pitch the same recipe to approaching Gen Y. Here is the gist:

First thing that you have to remember – Millennials will not read anything that exceeds the size of a tweet. That is why you recruiting message must fit into 140 characters or no one will bother. At the very least your message has to be split into small pieces (see above) and carefully sprinkled on top of a good deal of entertaining content. Suggestions include: sharing videos showcasing office gaming room, posting group photos of happily laughing employees, bragging about whose number of “Likes” is bigger, etc. Follow these rules and success is inevitable…

It would be funny if these ideas were not gaining momentum lately. Let’s take a moment to think about the implications.

First and foremost, this stereotype is quite unfair to many capable people of the Millennial generation. The popularity of social media simply cannot be used to define the entire social group. Gen Y is as diverse as any other generation and while it’s true that some Millennials are happy not to read anything longer than tweet, the question is: are you really after these people?

Are you really interested in people who made a choice not to make it beyond 140 characters?

I am not. For many obvious reasons, which I am not going to list here. But here’s the catch – because this idea is gaining momentum, Millennials who do not suffer from this new form of self-induced ADD can find themselves at a disadvantage competing in this framework, which will result in lower efficiency of the recruiting efforts. And Millennials will not be to blame for the low signal to noise ratio in your recruiting campaigns. You know, what goes around comes around.

I think this misconception stems from the fact that people fail to realize the difference between the marketing and recruiting environments. Don’t get me wrong: Twitter is a powerful information distribution tool that can be very useful. But let’s avoid “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” syndrome.

Effective marketing environment is not the same as effective recruiting environment.

Use the information distribution channels to bring people to the environment that is specifically designed to make your recruiting efforts more efficient, to give capable professionals more reasons to join your team, to interact, to collaborate, and to see beyond resume. The specific choice may depend on your hiring needs and your personal preferences. Just don’t do recruiting in a marketing channel – use each tool for what it was designed for.

With all the talk about social recruiting and how it’s going to change everything the simple truth is that social media were not designed to be a recruiting platform. And as soon as you accept it you will be able to use them much more effectively in your recruiting strategies rather than wasting your time trying to fit your recruiting message into 140 characters.

Vitaly Latush is a founder of BrightMesh – the knowledge network with naturally integrated recruiting tools creating a dynamic, collaborative hiring environment. Feel free to contact Vitaly if you are interested in innovations in this field.

In summary, Godin’s piece asserts: “Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you’re accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they’re doing and come join you.”

The majority of what passes for recruiting is not recruiting at all. It’s rote hiring, posting a job online and waiting for the applications to roll in. If you are an employer with a recognized brand name, you’ve got a fair chance of attracting hundreds of candidates instantly even if your job description is utter crap. In our still-depressed job market, maybe you don’t even need to be a recognized brand.

That’s going to change.

While Godin’s short piece focuses on the question of whether the job you’re hiring for is cool enough to be recruiting-worthy–a good question in and of itself–I’d like to focus on the question of the implications for the profession of recruiting itself.

Why Recruiting Will Change in 2010

While companies have yet to fully embrace social media technologies, they are now at least mostly aware of them and accepting of the fact that they are here to stay. Despite their terror, we’re going to see companies in 2010 and beyond begin to embrace these tools for the purpose of engaging with communities of talent for their hiring activities. Why? Mainly because they’re being dragged kicking and screaming in to this space by high profile customers who bring their issues there (see the Whirlpool example). Once companies get that their customers are there, it’s not a huge leap to realize that their next employees will likely come from the same place.

The unfortunate aspect of all this for anyone with recruiter in his or her job title is that the technology also disintermediates. In other words, if a hiring manager has great LinkedIn connections or is simply a good networker, why bother calling the need out to recruiting? Why get lost in the bureaucracy and paperwork of an HR department’s corporate hiring function?

If you are a corporate recruiter, you had better be able to do more than just post a requirement, run a phone screen, and forward a stack of resumes to the hiring manager. You need to be creative at finding, engaging with, and staying in contact with the communities of talent you want to make hires from.

If you’re a third party recruiter, 2010 will mean further erosion of your fees and profit margins unless you can know and be known by the talent you mean to hire. Third parties don’t win unless they are faster and better at networking, able to articulate why a position is worth leaving a stable job, and effective at winning the trust of both customers and talent.

The sky is not falling. It has already fallen, but I run into to many recruiters think it’s still there. The best recruiters are those who truly do recruit and can demonstrate their valuable expertise by again and again showing their deep connections with and commitment to the talent communities from which they hire.

It’s a remarkable stat; but like all stats it isn’t the full story.  The Careerbuilder survey sample comprised 307 hiring managers surveyed online who had, what was reported as,  ‘at least significant involvement in hiring decisions.’  Clearly, this is a sample of HR professionals not employers. And HR professionals are present in only a fraction UK companies.

Clearly 307 HR people checking Facebook for candidates is a very different proposition to 53% of UK employers doing so.

The survey is indicative of the buzz about social media recruitment. Social media recruitment is being touted as the ‘next big thing’ in recruitment. I don’t doubt it will be the ‘next big thing.’ But one has to be cautious about what that ‘next big thing’ will be. Indeed, for those of us involved in online recruitment one has to be cautious even about assumptions about recruiting online.

At the recent Hello Digital conference in Birmingham, I was stunned to learn from Deputy Head of Birmingham City Council Paul Tilsey that a full 40% of Birmingham business are not even online.  We can safely assume that, for recruiting purposes, a large portion of this 40%  don’t recruit online, never mind social media recruiting.

While many experts in recruitment are arguing that social media is the way to go and that job boards are over, they would appear to be pre-emptive. Rather, it is more  probable that, for the foreseeable future, job boards will be the first step for employers into online recruitment —especially for sourcing. Social networks will play, as they do already, a part in the candidate screening process but they are still some way from becoming efficient souring tools.

The Careerbuilder.co.uk survey is worth a look, however. It points out some of the things that HR professionals like and don’t like when they do check your online profile.

WESTBOROUGH, MA–(Marketwire – January 13, 2010) – JCSI, a corporate staffing consulting firm, surveyed HR executives and recruiters in a variety of industries to determine how they plan to find and attract the best talent in 2010. The study found that hiring demands are increasing for most companies, but recruiting teams are still limited with budget constraints. With the high costs and inefficiency of traditional candidate sourcing methods, recruiters are taking a proactive approach to reach candidates with online social networks like LinkedIn and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Recruiters and hiring managers are using these tools to bypass job boards, advertisements and agencies to connect with people qualified for their open positions.

Survey respondents indicated that even with the high volume of candidates in the marketplace, their biggest concern is the ability to find qualified candidates. While budgets remain tight, recruiters are focused on making quality hires as quickly as possible. Time-to-fill an open requisition was ranked as the most important success metric, above cost per hire.

“There is a shift in recruitment best practices occurring right now,” said Jim Sullivan, JCSI’s founder and President. “Companies are finding that it is far more productive to reach high quality candidates with online research and social media networking. This requires recruiting teams to develop new skills to communicate with potential candidates in their own online communities. Finding qualified candidates is only half the battle — the challenge is to get them interested in your positions. JCSI provides companies with the expertise and resources they need to make the best quality hires faster.”

Free Webinar Discussion: Join us on February 9, 2010 for a free webinar discussion about the trends that are changing recruitment best practices today. https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/653714242