We live in a social world, but we also live in a mobile world. iPhones. iPads. Instagram. People are interacting with the world around them – through maps, photography, instant communication, and more. So why shouldn’t the job search and discovery process be mobile as well? It should be. And it needs to be more efficient.

View nearby jobs through the map feature.

That’s why we just released a new TweetMyJobs mobile app - turning your iPhone or iPod Touch into the ultimate job-searching tool.

The application allows job seekers to search by role, industry and location and view jobs nearby on a map or using an augmented reality overlay.

At once, the TweetMyJobs app is powerful for businesses and seekers alike. For businesses, it enables job distribution and branding in the palm of a job seeker’s hand. Walking down the street or in a crowded mall? No problem – there are jobs around you. For job seekers, the ability to find work in their immediate area and apply via a mobile device is a no-brainer. Seekers can also receive job alerts, where they want them, when they want them. And, of course, the app is free.

For businesses, large and small, the ability to generate “foot traffic,” and local candidates – whether you’re looking to hire a barista or cashier, accountant or nurse, business analyst or CFO – is a superb advantage over competitors that aren’t distributing their jobs and their brand into the mobile world.

Potential employees and employers can now use their mobile devices to find the right job match. Don’t be left behind.

It’s no accident that Ramapo is consistently ranked as one of the best places to live in the United States, and we now have another reason to praise the efforts of the town and its leaders. Today, Supervisor Christopher P. St. Lawrence and the Ramapo Town Board launched The Ramapo Jobs Connector  in order to boost local employment and enhance economic development.

A glimpse of The Ramapo Jobs Connector.

The Ramapo Jobs Connector is a free service, powered by TweetMyJobs, that allows job seekers to leverage social media to connect with employers in a fast, efficient way. A number of local companies have already partnered with the town by posting their jobs – including Crowne Plaza, Good Samaritan Hospital, Cablevision and many others.

According to Supervisor St. Lawrence, “By adopting new technology and leveraging social media to drive local employment solutions, ‘The Ramapo Jobs Connector’ presents a unique opportunity for local residents and local employers to connect, thereby fostering future job growth in the town and county.”

The town of Ramapo recognizes the impact that technology has on recruiting today, and launching this initiative confirms the town’s commitment to fighting unemployment.

You’ve seen it on Twitter with the hashtag #BigData. You stumbled across it in The Wall Street Journal, complementing your morning grapefruit and cup of coffee. And it’s certainly going to be a topic for discussion at one of your next company staff meetings.

The amount of data in the world has been exploding – so much so that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two yearsalone. The trend has been widely covered over the last few years as the next frontier for innovation in technology, but only recently have those in the recruiting and talent acquisition fields taken a closer look and realized the massive opportunity for HR business decisions as well. Here’s a quick overview of what our community has been discussing and how it may soon affect your business:

HR Is Leveraging Big Data For Recruiting

• According to Josh Bersin, companies like UPS and Lowe’s are well along in the development of Big Data strategies to understand their own employees. But unlike Marketing and Sales organizations, HR teams are not filled with statisticians, analysts, and data visualization experts yet, and Bersin’s research shows that only 6% of Human Resources teams feel they are “highly skilled” at data analysis. We’re just getting started…

• At Luxottica Group, the Milan-based eyeglasses conglomerate, data analytics have disproven assumptions about gaps within the company’s recruiting strategy. The data showed it took an average 96 days to fill a position with an external candidate. The management team believed that the company’s recruiters acted too slow, but a statistical analysis found hiring managers dragged their feet about making decisions about who to hire. It now takes the company 46 days to hire external candidates, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. Data alone is not enough. Interpretation and analysis are the key…

• Analytics platforms derived from large data sets can vastly improve decision making. Cities like Atlanta, GA and Newark, NJ are tracking the number of citizens pursuing job opportunities, the type of positions being sought, the level of position, and the industries in which job seekers want to work. This data can provide government leaders with hyper-local insights that can help steer key strategic decisions to foster future job growth. Analytics platforms – tracking data continuously over time, can lead to the improvement of services, both private and public…

Access to data, for organizations of all sizes, has always been critical to success for companies in the technology, finance, insurance, and government spaces. And now, HR departments are poised to gain substantially from the use of big data. According to Bersin, “This is the time to apply data science to Human Resources. It isn’t easy, but the payoff is huge.”

Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, is recognized as one of the nations top authorities in Social Media Career Advancement. To learn Joshua’s secret strategies for shortening the job search and getting the right job right away, you can watch his exclusive video training.

By Joshua Waldman

Just this week, I received a letter from a blog reader who wanted to know if social media really was the way for her to find her next job, because she is of an “older” generation – her words not mine.

“What are your thoughts regarding Twitter as a tool to finding the next job? I’ve been hesitant to join and start tweeting (as I’m of an older generation and usually keep my private thoughts/feelings/opinions to myself) but I might just be limiting myself..? What do you think? Any and all suggestions, comments, best practices & critiques are welcome.”

Considering that this whole “generational excuse for not using social media” is coming up frequently, I thought I would address her question and help people new to Twitter overcome the resistance they might feel.

Job seekers are turning to social media during the job search.

First of all, let’s put the whole age thing aside. I have Boomer clients who don’t tweet, and I have Millennial clients who tell me that Twitter is for old people. And between the two of those groups, over 100 million people actively use Twitter. The problem is that Twitter is a platform, and new users expect a solution. Using Twitter without a purpose is much like walking into a bookstore, grabbing a book at random, and then complaining that it didn’t help you with your investment strategy. This can get very frustrating very fast.

Having a purpose when using Twitter will help you avoid all of those people talking about what they had for breakfast or what song they are listening to right now. After all, you control who you follow. And if you are choosing to use Twitter to find a job, then the people you choose to follow will most likely be relevant to your industry and your target organizations.

According to a recent survey, over 8 million Americans found a job through a connection made via Twitter.

So to answer my reader’s question, yes, Twitter is a fundamental tool for the modern job seeker. Avoiding it for whatever reason (age, resistance), puts you at a significant disadvantage in the marketplace.

Here’s my challenge to you this week. Spend one week actively using Twitter. There are plenty of books, videos and articles on how to be active on Twitter. If after one week, you hate it, fine. But I’m willing to bet that you will have had a really good time. And who knows, maybe you will have met your next boss!

Editor’s note: To learn more about using Twitter and other social distribution and branding tools in your recruitment efforts, you can visit our enterprise solution page.

Raman Gulati is the Senior Director of Product Development at TweetMyJobs.

By Raman Gulati

At fMC, Facebook unveiled Timeline for Pages - a great new design for the 37 million brand and business pages that will be rolled out to everyone on Friday.

We're integrating a social career site the new Timeline Page.

When Mike Hoefflinger, (Facebook’s Director of Global Business Marketing) made clear that the “Page” should be considered “mission control” for a business on Facebook, we immediately realized that this provided huge opportunities for companies looking to hire. Facebook is trying to help businesses craft a more personal story to build connections with people – exactly what recruiters and talent managers do each and every day!

So what if TweetMyJobs could innovate and enable recruiters and talent managers to integrate a social career site and connect with talent from within their new Timeline Page?

We decided to set ourselves the challenge of building an app that could do this and have it live before Timeline for Pages was rolled out to everyone on March 30th.   Our engineers and designers worked round the clock and with one day to spare it’s great to announce the new app went live today and is ready for your business.  We focused on 5 core principles:

1. Design – It’s super cool and feels like part of your Timeline.
2. Social – Anyone can share jobs, recommend friends, and enable referrals to you from trusted sources thanks to the Who? Button.
3. Search – It’s dead easy for seekers to find jobs through search or by looking on our Google Maps mashup.
4. Custom – It comes with a suite of tools that allows you to promote your brand, add content, include videos and control functionality.
5. Talent – Now you can build a community of people interested in working with you and send them targeted jobs where they want them, when they want them.

Here’s what it looks like – check it out live on TweetMyJobs’ Facebook Page.

A snapshot of our new career page on Facebook.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has maintained his commitment to helping job seekers in Newark by releasing this video urging job seekers to visit Newark Jobs Connect powered by TweetMyJobs.

According to Mayor Booker, job seekers should visit newark.tweetmyjobs.com and “put in the information of the kind of job you’re looking for and then instantly the site begins to push to you valuable job information through any portal you want – through Facebook, through Twitter, through your cell phone – this is a powerful way for you now to engage in your job search.”

Mayor Booker and the City of Newark, New Jersey are pioneers in using technology to help connect employers with job seekers, and we’re honored and proud to embark on this public-private partnership.

You can visit newark.tweetmyjobs.com and see how local Newarkers are getting job matches where they want, when they want.

Social media is a topic that’s omnipresent at TweetMyJobs, and we’re constantly excited by the articles we read that illustrate how the social web is ingrained in our culture. Whether it’s humanitarian awareness evolving into the most viral video of all time, one speech generating over 750,000 tweets, or the meteoric rise of another social network, one thing is consistent: people love social media.

The best strategy is to jump right in.

We use social media to discover information quickly and efficiently, but it’s easy to forget that these prominent social networks only launched 10 years ago - or less.  With the size and reach of networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that these platforms are now being used by businesses to connect with talent, but disrupting an industry is not an overnight accomplishment.

Employers are more hesitant than job seekers to alter their recruiting strategies because these efforts take time and money to execute, and businesses are – and should be – careful about the talent they bring into their organization. However, being overly cautious can mistakenly lead to inaction and missed opportunities to find the best talent for your organization.

Social media has proven to be a viable platform to communicate for media, sports, politics and entertainment. It’s natural that businesses are (correctly) seeing these social media platforms as a viable way to recruit talent. Businesses understand that social media is important, and now they just need that initial encouragement to get started.

Our friends at Fistful of Talent offered great advice last week: when it comes to social media and recruiting, don’t over-think it, just do it! Every business has different goals and objectives for recruiting, but sometimes the best strategy is to take a leap of faith and figure out how to best utilize the tools as you go.

Embrace social recruiting and jump in with both feet. Good luck!

The highly anticipated February jobs report was released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and revealed the national unemployment rate held steady at 8.3%. The economy added 227,000 jobs in February and, according to some, is a positive indication of our country’s economic recovery. The BLS releases the unemployment numbers every month, but February’s figures are particularly interesting because of the political implications they have in an election year.

Social recruiting helps to close the communication gap between job seekers and employers.

Instead of addressing the politics of the numbers, let’s focus on the fact that our job market could potentially be recovering. After all, we’re in the business of connecting job seekers with employers and have been working tirelessly to build tools that put job seekers back to work.

Although the positive news is well received, there are still glaring discrepancies in our labor market – specifically, the 24 million Americans that are still unemployed or underemployed while 52% of US companies have trouble finding talent. This is a clear indication that the distribution model is broken, and it’s essential for companies  to continue to disrupt the status quo and close the communication gap between job seekers and employers.

The “Great Recession” impacted each industry differently, and some fared better than others. The reality is that all companies were forced to evolve and adapt in order to survive, and the same logic applies to how employers find talent. Employers must put their positions in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible, and social media is the most logical place to start. Facebook has as many users as the entire Internet did in 2004 and Twitter is now growing at a faster pace than Facebook – the untapped talent pool in social media is undeniable.

The unemployment rate is just one indicator, and we’re also starting to see a shift from the “old” online recruiting model. Forward thinking mayors in Newark and Atlanta have already adopted new, social technology to help job seekers connect with employers, and the masses are beginning to follow suit.

Are you incorporating social media in your recruiting strategy? Sound off in the comments below.

Mayors Kasim Reed (Atlanta, GA) and Cory Booker (Newark, NJ) are innovating through social media – launching social recruiting jobs platforms in their respective cities to connect seekers with employers. The Atlanta, GA and Newark, NJ social recruiting initiatives are gaining momentum, as seen in the embedded video above, from FOX’s On The Job Hunt special feature.

He’s been ranked one of America’s “most social Mayors” for years – tweeting from his Blackberry and engaging in conversations with his constituents morning, noon and night. Today, Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker’s status as a forward looking, technology driven leader solidified even more as he announced the Newark Jobs Connect platform.

The platform distributes more than 35,000 available jobs across the digital landscape and matches job seekers with employers through social media, email and mobile technologies to addresses the long term unemployment issue in Newark. In addition to the technological advantages, seekers have access to a variety of career resources to help them throughout the searching, networking, and interview process.

According to Mayor Booker, “Residents of Newark will directly benefit by hearing about available jobs before anyone else and Newark employers will be able to reach qualified, local candidates fast and first.”

This initiative firmly places the Mayor and the City of Newark boldly out front in their commitment to create job opportunities for their citizens using the best tools in the marketplace. We’re thrilled to launch newark.tweetmyjobs.com with Mayor Booker and power the Newark Jobs Connect platform.