Doug Berg, Jobs2web founder, told Recruiter that one of the purposes of the pilot was to see if the platform would produce the type of hiring results that might allow the company to become less dependent on job boards and allow it to do more direct resourcing.

“The hard part of Web 2.0 is that it is so complex,” he said. “There are so many different channels - social networks, search engines and mobile elements. How can you pick every job and instantly communicate it to all these channels, and then bring candidates back to you in a way that you can measure and give credit to the sources that are driving new talent?”

Jobs2web translates and optimises a job vacancy depending on the outbound channel and then brings candidates back to a single place, such as a corporate careers site.

“So recruiters aren’t sitting all day on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter spending their days becoming horribly inefficient web people rather than recruiting talent,” Berg said. Users of the platform see a Recruiting Dashboard that provides real-time data and analytics on their recruiting process and practices. John

Phillips, director of Global Talent Labs at Microsoft, said it had enabled the software giant to quickly transform its recruiting practices. “We knew that we needed to test the limits of typical recruiting practices such as utilising job boards and other static post-and-apply processes,” he said. “By partnering with Jobs2web on advanced marketing strategies that leverage the newer technologies, we will be able to source qualified talent at lower costs.”

Jobs2web has around 150 global clients and Berg claims that in many cases these report 70-80% reduced costs compared to using job boards. Although less well known in the UK than the US, Jobs2web’s presence is starting to build through its worldwide network of clients.

One of the areas it is focusing on is the mobile recruiting market, which Berg believes is already more sophisticated in the UK and Europe than the US.

“We’re looking at how you can automate a text conversation that would trigger a hiring event,” he said. “People won’t apply through a mobile channel, there’s just too much data. So we’re trying to work on ways we can transform a job into a text message conversation that would then lead to a more formal application process.”

www.jobs2web.com