With the new service CellJob, online recruitment in Canada has taken on a new media: the cell phone. Brand new to Canada, the service enables employers to send their job offers directly to candidates’ cell phones via SMS text messages. CellJob was recently launched in Quebec, in French, by the organizers of the National Career Event job fair.
How it works: job seekers must first post their resumé on the celljob.ca website. They can then follow up with job offers either online or directly via their cellphone. Job alerts are sent only by text messages and appear just like the job listings found in newspapers: very short, with abbreviations and reference numbers.
Interested candidates can request further information about an employment alert by texting the word “PLUS” from their mobile phones. The applicant may answer an alert by texting “CV,” followed by the job’s reference number, which immediately forwards their resumé saved in their CellJob account. CellJob works with all mobile network operators, however job seekers should have an unlimited text messaging plan if they want to avoid paying for each message.
Employers post their jobs online in the same manner as they would on conventional job sites, only here they are limited to 208 characters in order to conform to cell phone display dimensions. Publication of job offers is free until April 30.
CellJob rides on the upward trend of text messaging: more than 6 out of 10 Canadians use text messaging several times a day. In particular, the service targets individuals in the 18-34 age group, 75% of whom own a cellular phone. These young job seekers use text messaging almost three times more than the rest of the population. By the same token, they are turning less to traditional media: newspapers, magazines and television…
Will this service appeal to Canadian employers? It has already proven its success in France and Great Britain where it was launched in 2005 by the site Mobiljob: more than 250 clients and 50,000 job candidates are now registered. CellJob clearly enables employers to set themselves apart and more precisely target sought after candidates. Additionally, it may be a solution to the mass onslaught of applications that is more and more often criticized of general job sites…