With many people looking to change jobs at the beginning of the year, C&M Recruitment Consultancy reports a huge 101.6 per cent annual increase in the number of people using a mobile device to search for the latest travel vacancies.

While some of this can be accounted for by the traditional New Year job search, the rise is great news for the travel industry and also of genuine importance to recruiters looking to connect with candidates.

Commenting on the figures, Barbara Kolosinska, sales director at C&M Recruitment Consultancy, said:“Although the outlook for the economy remains uncertain, the coming year appears extremely promising for the travel recruitment sector and should certainly provide a more positive 12 months than we saw in 2012.

“However, it is clear from the huge 101.6 per cent annual rise in mobile searches that this is the true growth area of recruitment. We are paying particular attention to the possibilities that this presents and any recruiters that don’t adapt to these technologies risk paying the consequences in years to come.”

While searches on mobiles still only account for 19.14 per cent of all traffic to the C&M Recruitment Consultancy site, this is nearly double the 10.82 per cent share from a year ago.

Ms Kolosinska added: “It is increasingly evident that more and more people are searching for a new job on their phone or tablet and therefore recruiters need to improve their mobile offering in order to attract the top talent.”

At the beginning of January, C&M also saw a significant overall increase in traffic to its site (up by 72 per cent compared to December 2012 and up annually by 12 per cent). While this is likely to be largely due to people choosing the New Year as a perfect time to start their job hunt, this still bodes very well for the recruitment sector in 2013.

“We have also seen more candidates using social networks as a way to find new positions recently. The amount of people taking this approach is only likely to grow further and we have increased our presence on sites such as LinkedIn as a result of this. Social media and employer branding is set to become even more important as we progress through 2013,” Ms Kolosinska added.