Still not sold on the need to use twitter, email or mobile job alerts to engage candidates? What if a simple mobile TXT campaign could make a potential candidate get excited, fill them with anticipation and even, pleasure? Would you use it then?

Imagine this: you are Pavlov's Poodle and your Twitter Alert, TXT message notification, incoming wall post notice (along with other social media 'incoming content' cues) are all bells triggering a behavioral response. Triggering, in fact, your brain's pleasure centers and creating a loops which virtually assures continued engagement. In "Seeking. How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous." Emily Yoffe reveals some amazing research shedding light on how the acts of searching and finding trigger pleasure centers in the brain. Remember those studies with lab rats who would ignore food as long as they could press a button to stimulate their brain's pleasure centers? Well -- essentially we're the rats and Google is the button. One of many such 'buttons' like mobile phone TXTs, Tweets, emails, etc.

According to the results from some researchers, it isn't even the act of getting a reward which is the most powerful element in this phenomena. The acts of wanting and seeking or EXPECTING new information can become more addictive and pleasurable than actually getting the information in question. So you sit down to search for one item of information and find yourself still online an hour later performing search-after-search, caught in a loop where the act of seeking is just as important and fulfilling as actually finding what you are looking for. This is called a seeking/wanting system and if you've ever felt a shiver of excitement or anticipation at the incoming tone for a TXT message, tweet or email you have experienced the phenomena first-handed.

So let's go back to our would-be candidate, the job seeker who has requested to be notified whenever a position fitting their criteria has been posted or when an article specific to their interests is available. You're already providing them convenience -- providing information to them in the media and format they have requested through the device of their choice. All great reasons to take advantage of this technology. But if researchers are correct in their findings, you are also 'priming' your job seeker: getting them excited, triggering anticipation pleasure in expectation of a 'reward' as you ring the bell. Would these be worthwhile emotions to tap into and engage right before they read about an job opening specifically related to their career goals? That would be pretty powerful stuff, and is very likely exactly what is happening every time someone gets a mobile (or other social media or email) career-related message.