When you talk about any technology these days there is one word that will inevitably enter your conversation.  

Mobile.

Everything is going mobile. It still amazes me how much computing power is now available in the palm of your hand. We no longer call them cell phones. They are now called mobile devices. You can still make phone calls if you want, just in case you get tired of texting.

Be it BYOD or use-what-we-give-you, organizations are giving more thought to how they're managing use of mobile devices.

Last month, I launched a survey in conjunction with my work at Software Advice to get a pulse on what companies are doing to manage employee-owned mobile devices. I've grabbed a few highlights to share here.

I just got back from the ERE Expo in San Diego and have a whole bunch of thoughts I need to sift through about the conference. As you would expect there was a heavy emphasis on all things Social and Mobile, but there was one demo I received that was a stand out.

A lot of recruiting technology vendors have been developing mobile friendly pages and applications for their career sections. While we wait for them to mature, several companies have taken the initiative to build their own, like Sodexo and Pepsico.

But before you go out and try to build you own, you need to see what Jibe has put together.

Over the last year or two I have been looking closely at the trends in the talent management technology market. Things like Social, Mobile, and Gamification. I have to admit that I have been a little skeptical. At some point won't people get tired of being so social? Isn't the laptop already pretty mobile? And when I hear words like gamification, I just want to punch something in the face.

But a few weeks ago my mother came for a visit to attend my daughter's high school graduation party. As we sat around chatting, someone would ask a question like "is it supposed to rain today?" In every case, my mom would whip out her iPhone and say "I can tell you." And she would proceed to thumb her way to the answer.

As it turns out, my mom is an iPhone addict!?!

Over the last few months I have been quite busy putting together the Corporate Mobile Readiness Report.  I will have to admit it was not that long ago that I was a bit of a skeptic when it came to Mobile Recruiting.  

A few weeks back I wrote a post about the Mobile Apply process and suggested it was a cop-out for employers who stop short of allowing job seekers complete the entire apply process on a mobile device. 

Last week I posed the question "what is driving mobile recruiting?" After watching the video clip below I had an epiphany. Have a look and see if you get the same point of view:

Over the last six months as I have fully immersed myself into the world of mobile recruiting one of the first things I learned about was the difference between an mSite and a native app. I have found that there is a lot of confusion out there on this subject as well as some strong opinions, so I thought it would be worthy of a discussion.

First the definitions:

A few months back we published the Corporate Mobile Readiness Report, an assessment of the Fortune 500's presence on the mobile web. We evaluated the companies on six criteria ranging from native apps, to mobile optimization of the corporate site, the career site, as well as the continuity between them. 

If you work in Human Resources chances are you have heard the Silo analogy once or twice. Ok maybe more times than you care to remember. But the silo issue is not exclusively an HR issue.  All business functions are potential silos.  

A few weeks ago I wrote about how email has become a key driver of mobile recruiting. I was essentially making an educated guess that a big percentage of email is being read on mobile devices, largely because of the way I read email.  Even before I switched from a Blackberry to iPhone, I would typically read emails for the first time on mobile, and then later on the desktop to access attachments or to follow links to additional content.  But with the iPhone, more and more content is now consumable right from the palm of my hand.

Yesterday I shared a few data points from our new white paper Smart Phones in the Workplace, which will be published next week. [Click here to read Part 1] It is a survey of professional workers regarding their smart phone usage which provides some interesting insights on the impact of mobile technology on workplace communications.

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:

Before I joined iMomentous I needed to do some homework. I had been involved with the recruiting technology business since the first applicant tracking systems of the early 90's, and I was still getting a handle on the rapid adoption of Social Media.  Mobile technology was just sort of a future possibility.  So I went to the source that most people go to when conducting due diligence - I went to Google.