My father always emphasized that “90% of success is just showing up.” It reflects his dual beliefs about the genius of Woody Allen, and the importance of putting yourself “out there for something to happen”.

In the game of finding a job, being at the right place at the right time can be invaluable — to both the job seeker and potential employer. Every opportunity lost by employers to engage a potential star worker when they’re on your turf consuming and enjoying your brand is a tragedy, and unfortunately all too common. Every day good candidates pass through top brands store fronts and street scapes, and never know they’re passing like ships in the night.

Location-based services for the enterprise may be slow in coming, but consumer-facing successes in the realm of retail marketing — like the recent Foursquare and AmEx partnership — point to a growing opportunity in audience engagement through mobile phones. Which is exactly why location is so important for enterprise employers, government agencies responsible for workforce development, and high volume staffing firms that serve as the lifeblood of our national labor market to “get” location-based services and the power of mobile.

For companies in sectors like retail, logistics, healthcare, hospitality, and manufacturing, where turnover and time matter most to their bottom line, Job Rooster can help recruit and retain top workers both on-premise and online, bringing a truly “anytime, anywhere” recruitment platform that runs 24/7/365 to connect employers to the worldwide workforce. Brands like these see the interconnection between customer loyalty, employee engagement, and financial performance — and how being able to engage any customer (or candidate) anytime, anywhere on their mobile phone is a huge advantage for firms like American Express. For the most profitable, savvy brands, mobile is fast becoming a de rigeur part of their hiring toolkit.

As location-based services evolve for the corporate environment, expect to see savvy employers capitalize on the power of mobile to compete and win for the best talent. Indeed, as we’ve seen and learned over the past few months, recruitment marketing platforms like Job Rooster can help employers everywhere extend their recruitment brand proactively and respectfully to their customers in real-time to make sure you identify and capture the best talent no matter where it’s standing (but particularly when that talent’s right in your store and enjoying your brand!).

Apple recently got caught enabling a seemingly hapless habit of tracking iPhone 4 user locations. Though their intentions may be in question, their insight is spot-on: location based data will redefine the hardware and software landscape. Steve Jobs himself has proclaimed that “Apple is a mobile devices company” — if that assertion doesn’t give you a glimpse into the future of technology, then little may.

Just as location-based services are being embraced across industries, we’re learning there are many nuances to creating, defining, and managing the boundaries between customers, technology, and enterprises interests’. Whether it be mobile banking, mobile health, or mobile recruitment, each service platform has a different set of best practices that govern candidate/customer data management. Enterprise employers, especially, need to know these requirements in each local market they ‘operate’ in. Thankfully, most service providers are making this increasingly easy to negotiate “check-ins” on mobile devices everywhere.

In particular, location-based services are redefining recruitment efforts for enterprise employers and large placement practices who are being forced to foray into new digital territory through social media and mobile ‘apps’. By taking your recruitment marketing efforts “mobile”, you open powerful new lines of communication to candidates through SMS text messaging, voice, and video recruitment. If you were to dream big and believe industry analyst Tom Ahonen, “mobile is in fact the fastest-growing TRILLION-dollar industry in the economic history of mankind. That is why Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, etc are all interested to get in.”

But for all these opportunities, mobile is messy, exactly because it integrates our personal and professional lives into one small space. In these tightly clustered digital spaces, confidentiality and compliance are critical, and the candidate must be in control.

Should we track candidate and worker locations? What can this data be used for? Are there times when it’s more or less appropriate? To many of the questions, the answer is “yes” — the question is more often now “how?”

The benefits of embracing “mobile recruiting” are manifold, and include a first-of-its-kind opportunity to engage candidates in more meaningful, timely, and thoughtful conversations that benefit from location-aware mobile phones. Location-aware recruitment marketing campaigns and real-time workforce management are enormous opportunities for the human resources industry as a whole to rediscover its fundamental purpose: connecting with candidates on their terms, and on their turf.

At Job Rooster, we’re proud to be putting people back to work faster, cheaper, and more meaningful by engaging the World Wide Workforce both online and through their mobile phone.

We’re using location-based insights to help recruit new talent in new lands. We’re engaging prospective candidates in fresh, meaningful conversations that are sensitive to their interests and everyday realities. We’re getting people contractor and temporary workers to work on-time by texting them directions to job sites if they’re late. There’s a whole world of wonder and opportunity to explore with mobile recruitment — the surface of which we’ve only begun to scrape.

Indeed, we’d love to tell you all about what we think we can do together by socializing and mobilizing your workforce. Ping us, anytime, anywhere — we’d love to reach out and get in touch with you.

What percent of rural Chinese do you think owns a cell phone? 15%? Maybe even 30%? According to January’s Gallup Management Journal, almost 90% of rural Chinese have cell phones, and this trend is also being seen in other areas and countries that are often considered “developing” (you can get a brief summary of the article, along with a link to download the podcast here). Moreover, the report details that among Chinese who feel that they are struggling to get by economically, 75% still own a cell phone. The report’s author suggests that this statistic supports the idea that owning a cell phone in China has become somewhat of a necessity. The question then asked is what we should make of all this connectivity?

The high penetration rate of cell phones, coupled with the fact that since 2008, 180 million more Chinese have internet access, paves the way, this report concludes, for creative mobile marketing to reach what is expected to be the 3rd largest market in a matter of years (or even months). The report focuses heavily on how China’s enormous, untapped mobile market can be won over by clever and culturally-conscious marketers. But this, it seems, misses, or at least oversimplifies, the point.

The power of the mobile phone in (especially rural) areas is not to bombard people with advertisements, but to find ingenious ways to use the most simple cell phone technology possible to improve people’s lives. Such examples include using cell phones to transfer money cheaply, report unfair elections in rural areas, track outbreaks of highly communicable diseases, and provide rural farmers with price information about far off produce markets. In a seminar on economic development, a fellow student presented a paper detailing the welfare improvements seen when farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa could use their cell phone to get information about which of several distant produce markets had the highest produce prices. With this technology, farmers did not have to waste time traveling to markets with lower prices, received higher prices for their produce, and lost less produce to spoilage. These are the types of solutions that I hope to see spring from the proliferation of cell phone ownership: solutions with the primary goal and result of welfare improvement.

If you’re under 30 and daily experience stats like this — “Young people are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed.” — then it’s understandable that you’d be pissed off and possibly rioting.

Indeed, global unemployment is triggering global uprisings at an astonishing rate: “Unemployment is a scourge of society right now, and it has to be the front-and-center issue,” said Michael Greenstone, a former staff member for the White House Council of Economic Advisers. With youth unemployment nearing 40% in many countries, people are taking to the streets and airwaves to mobilize for change.

With Government the biggest employer and the one with the most to lose, it’s no wonder they are focusing on youth workers, many of which are currently earning between $15-30/hr — placing them in livelihoods well under the Federal poverty level!

And therein lays the rub and the worry for government: we’re under-preparing, under-paying, and undermining a generation of young workers — just at a time when we’re about to see mass retirements by Baby Boomers, who left a host of big, expensive problems in our laps:

• Record-breaking public debt and unemployment
• Global Warming
• Political unrest and despair

Not the rosiest prospects for those of us under 30, but there are concrete things we can do to turn the tide in our favor:

1. Reduce military spending by half — it’s a win-win for everyone.
2. Ask government to look at the unemployment problem differently, and turn OneStop Career Centers into lean, mean, distributed workforce development machines that user services like Job Rooster to put workers back to work today.
3. Make finding a job free and easy for everyone, and eliminate the need to have a computer or resume by taking job search mobile. Connect job seekers to local “upskilling” and training programs — particularly youth, who can’t travel as far as adults — using location-based technology.
4. Increase the retirement age slowly but surely.

Which ultimately may give us the time we need to get to work on what really matters: putting our government back to work for us, creating the jobs of tomorrow, all by solving today’s problems.

Shocking news is emerging that yet another hurdle has been placed in front of people without jobs – some employers are refusing to even consider candidates who are currently unemployed. When what we most need – to get people back to work – is being held against those who have lost their jobs, how can we possibly expect the situation to turn around?  These practices keep those fortunate enough to still have a job employed, while keeping those who have fallen upon hard times down and amounts to discrimination against unemployed people, many of whom were laid off in economic conditions which were not their fault.

For the 13.9 million unemployed Americans, this will only serve to make the job search even harder.  One rationale for the move is that those who are unemployed have skills that are obsolete.  However, such flimsy reasoning only serves to kick those who are already downtrodden.

Furthermore, a large percentage of those currently unemployed are minorities.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among African Americans is at 15.7% and 11.9% for Hispanics, while unemployment among whites is 8%. Among the groups most hard hit with layoffs during the downturn are older women and disabled workers.

While this practice may not be widespread and is under investigation by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, it is unacceptable in any degree. What we need is a society that works to actively help people get people hired instead of discriminating based on applicants’ current unemployment status. The reasons for unemployment among almost 10 percent of the nation are varied, and to use such a blunt tool to sort through applicants is unfairly biased against all the hard-working folks without jobs and does a disservice to everyone involved.

At Job Rooster, we are finding better ways to help HR professionals quickly sort through candidates based on better criteria – such as years of experience, education level or certifications in the necessary fields, among others. Isn’t it time that recruiters look at emerging technologies to increase the quality of their candidate pool and stop unnecessary discriminatory behavior? It is good for business, and it’s good for unemployed Americans.

The seeds of unrest are sown on the streets of unemployment: Algeria, Brahrain, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran. If one were to look further afield, a huge number of governments are faced with double digit unemployment, growing unrest, and a highly connected, mobile citizen-base. All of which is driving massive social and economic change in ways that we’ve never seen before.

As we watch these revolutions play out on our computer screens, mobile phones, and TVs, the power of mobile and social technology to affect change becomes awe-inspiring, and at times, frightening.

Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones, and millions of other digital resources are forcing governments worldwide to develop Internet “kill” switches that instantly darken communications between millions of people — all to eliminate and kill social unrest. In this connected age, we are seeing clear ideological lines being drawn that define the role of technology in different cultural and political environments.

Where technology is embraced and it’s core competency of connecting people and increasing transparency is supported by governments and the private sector, we see economic activity and political freedoms flourish. Where technology is malnourished and beaten down, we see unemployment proliferate and the seeds of social unrest take root.

As these challenges and phenomenons spread (and they are, quickly) to China and other developing nations through the affordability of mobile technology, governments must publicly wrestle with defining policies that will either result in empowerment, or embarrassment.

In the US, President Obama recently visited Silicon Valley to discuss how technology can kickstart the economy. Deploying broadband to every corner of America will generate jobs and improve livelihoods. More importantly, embracing technology will not only put the folks standing on street corners today first line for the jobs of tomorrow, but also rectify a long-standing social injustice that has already kept far too many people standing on the streets for far too long. Which is why ensuring every citizen has affordable, quality access to the Internet is an essential start.

But we must also ensure fair pricing policies from Internet providers and cellphone companies if we hope to make “always-on” accessibility equally available to everyone. We cannot “price out” those who are most in need of the information that can find them jobs, healthcare, and essential financial services by favoring paying users over non-paying ones, otherwise this technical gain will be short lived.

Information wants to be free. Government investment in our communications infrastructure can create jobs today and connect workers nationwide to the jobs of tomorrow. Putting in place smart policies that make these networks and information freely available to everyone is the cheapest, fastest, and best way to kickstart an economy, put folks back to work, and ultimately uproot the seeds of social unrest.

High unemployment is triggering revolt throughout the Middle East. Youth, especially, have taken to the streets to decry their future prospects. With no visible action from government reducing the painful reality of unemployment on the streets, protesters are beginning to take to the streets — and they’re using text messages, Twitter, and Facebook to do it.

One of our favorite headlines in the last 48 hours was “Protests organized largely via text message were the largest yet, with more than 1,000 marching” (NY Times, 2/13/2011).

These riots in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia signify an opening volley from Youth workers who are finding new ways to mobilize, vocalize, and redress unemployment through regime change.

For those of us watching these trends from the US — particularly those in Washington, DC — it’s a palpable call to action: mobilize the worldwide workforce proactively, as a force for good, before they do it on their own and cripple our daily economy more than it already is.

As simple as text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook may seem, they are the means through which we can mobilize the workers of tomorrow. HR professionals, workforce development experts, and government leaders must recognize this opportunity to engage workers — particularly youth, minority, disabled, and veteran job seekers — and put them first in line for the jobs of tomorrow.

We recently wrote on how government can put millions of workers back to work through the use of simple text messaging services. Before protesters take to the streets to riot, let us have a small revolution and riot with our domestic workforce system, and (re)engage these job seekers on their turf, in their own terms, using mobile and social media to help them find a job.

Text Recruiting on TV!

It’s official — text recruiting is finally catching on. Check out the blurb below from ABC’s feature story this morning about how SMS/text blows away the competition by getting more interest faster:

“TEXT ALERTS: Since the average open rate for marketing emails hovers around 20 percent, many employers are embracing another method of delivery: mobile text messages, where the open rates are as high as 98 percent.

On the careers section of AT&T’s website, anyone can sign up to join the company’s Talent Network to receive hot job leads via text message based on location and job type. So far more than 700,000 people have opted in. When there’s an immediate opening, this is among the first stops for AT&T’s outreach efforts to alert prospective applicants. This offers greater accuracy and timeliness than many third party alerts can provide.

Visit the websites of the large organizations you’re eyeing for openings, and see if there’s an option to sign up for text alerts on job leads that match your needs. You won’t be able to apply through your mobile device, but the alert will prompt you to go online to submit a resume when a strong posting catches your attention.” (ABC News)

Job Rooster continues to lead the the industry in helping employers, job boards, recruiters, and applicant tracking systems “go mobile.” It’s an exciting, burgeoning field that’s opening up new possibilities in recruitment — so sign up today and let us help you get back to work!

Times and consumer use of technology are a changin'. Today this Special Agent is giving you 10 ways HR pros can use QR codes. Grab your smart phone and focus.....