According to data released by the vertical search engine for jobs called LinkUp, 20 percent of job seekers use their smartphone to look for jobs. LinkUp reported that mobile traffic jumped to 20.8% of overall first quarter traffic, up from 1.1% the same period a year ago.

LinkUp is a job search engine indexing only jobs that are found on company websites. The search engine does not list any jobs from other job boards, nor does it allow anyone to post jobs directly to the site. Rather, LinkUp currently lists about 725,000 job openings indexed and updated daily from approximately 21,000 company websites throughout the U.S. LinkUp offers mobile job apps for Android, iPhone/iPod, and iPad.

Of all the regions in the US where people are looking for jobs using a mobile phone, Washington, D.C. had the largest percentage of mobile traffic, with 56% of all job seekers using a mobile device to look for jobs. The other regions were:

Illinois 31.7%
Georgia 31.3%
Mississippi 30.8%
Texas 28.4%

The regions/states that showed the lowest percentage of mobile visitors:
Nebraska
Arkansas
Iowa
Dakotas (North Dakota and South Dakota)

Amongst the cities on the list, Chicago had the most number of job seekers using a mobile phone to look for jobs, with 6.5 percent. New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Minneapolis also had a significant amount of users using their mobile devices to search for jobs.

79.7% of visitors to the LinkUp web site used an Android device to find jobs, which is up from 21.2% for the same period last year.

Surprisingly, however, Apple iPhone usage fell from dominating last year’s first quarter numbers at 62.1%, down to 12.3% in Q1 2011. BlackBerry came in just under 0.5% for all job seekers. So, what does that tell me? Apple iPhone users are more likely to have a job currently and are not looking for a job. And there apparently are a lot of Android users who are out of work–more so than this same time last year.

So, if you are looking for a job, you had better go out and get an Apple iPhone.

Originally published on billhartzer.com