Recruiters need to be aware of the patterns of candidate behaviour over a typical 24-hour period, as well as over a longer period of time, research by job board Jobsite suggests.

Speaking at a conference organised by The Forum for In-house Recruitment Managers (The FIRM) last month, Mervyn Dinnen, content and community manager at Jobsite, outlined how jobseeker behaviour could be broken down into distinct time slots during a typical weekday 24 hours.

• Midnight to and early hours – low traffic.

• 6am-8am – pick up in mobile activity as jobseekers check what new jobs have come in. It was important for emails to “have a lot of detail”, said Dinnen.

• During the day – mobile drops off and traffic from PCs increases. Job-hunting activity at work is more covert, with greater use of social media and professional networks, such as LinkedIn.

• 6pm into evening – this is the time that jobseekers do most of their search and research, and is particularly important for passive candidates. 

Dinnen said that mobile was increasingly important for jobseekers using Jobsite, with traffic from mobile rising from just 1% of all traffic in Jan 2009 to 22% today, and continuing to rise month-on-month.  

“Mobile is becoming the big way that people access information,” said Dinnen, adding that opening rates of emails on mobile were higher than on a PC. “Sites have to be ready to cope with that.”

As Recruiter reported last week, despite the growing importance of mobile, there is still someway to go before the so-called mobile revolution within recruitment is complete.