Over the course of the last decade the online industry including job boards has faced the challenge of adapting to the continual rise of mobile phones. This has required businesses to adapt with responsive site designs in order to deliver the optimal user experience. As indicated in 2016 Job Board Survey Results, 59% of job boards reported that their sites derive 30% or more of their traffic from mobile sources. This number significantly increased from 2015 as half of the respondents indicated 20% from mobile sources.

The continual growth of mobile dependency and adaptation in the market presents a tremendous opportunity for the job board industry to leverage the wealth of information gathered on job boards and target specific users to address needs in the market. As such, today our focus is to provide an overall of the valuable opportunity with SMS campaigns to target job board users.

Mobile Phone Usage 

• Text messaging is the most frequently used featured on smart phones – 97% of smart phones owners used text messaging at least once over the course of the study period
• Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smartphone of some kind – This number has dramatically increased from 35% in the spring of 2011
• 43% of smartphone owners have used their phone in the last year to look up information about a job
• And, 18% of smartphone have submitted a job application

Source: PEW Research Center

Let’s continue on and dive into the opportunity for job boards to target their audience through SMS. As evidenced during our tenure within the industry, delivering quality applicants and in a timely manner are extremely advantageous to advertisers on the job board and greatly establish the job board as the go-to source for candidates. Therefore, what performance metrics can SMS deliver?

• 98% Open rate
• 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being delivered
• 19% click-through rates

Source: Mobile Squared

The approach with SMS differs than the traditional concept of job boards by taking a proactive approach to target your user base with the specific requirements of the employer. As indicated above, the market is positively responding to the SMS usage and provides job board an avenue to target users in an effective manner.