CONCORD, Mass. – With an improving labor market and unemployment at a seven-year low, it’s taking 8% longer and costing 7% more to hire, according to Bersin. Recruiters understand that the talent acquisition universe has changed. Candidates are like consumers, researching employers the same way they research products and expecting their engagement with employers to be hyper relevant and transparent. To help talent acquisition teams adapt to modern recruiting, SmashFly Technologies, the leading Recruitment Marketing Platform provider, today released The SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Report Card for the 2015 Fortune 500, an analysis of how the largest U.S. companies are using best-practice marketing principles to attract and hire talent.

The full Report is available for download at go.smashfly.com/RMreportcard.

The Report provides talent acquisition teams with insight into 13 modern Recruitment Marketing practices that help employers find and attract their target candidate personas, engage passive talent on social and mobile, and nurture leads and convert them into qualified applicants. The Report features analysis of best practices, emerging practices and which practices are largely untapped, including best-practice company examples for each category. Organizations can learn how their strategies compare and which practices they should invest in to better compete for talent.

Key Findings

The Report found that 27% (134 companies on the 2015 Fortune 500 list) earned an “A” or “B” for their use of Recruitment Marketing, giving them an edge in the competition for talent due to their use of:

• Employee stories and videos on their career site with landing pages per job family that bring their employer brand to life
  Talent network forms that let pre-applicants opt-in to receive relevant communications and job alerts without being required to apply for a job first
• Careers-specific social channels and blogs that promote content and culture, not just jobs
  Messaging specific for student and campus hiring as well as diversity and military initiatives

Overall, this year’s Fortune 500 class earned a “C” average with a score of 9.86, demonstrating “good” use of Recruitment Marketing practices. Other Report highlights include:

• 13 companies (3%) scored an “A,” earning a spot on the Report’s “Dean’s List”
• 70 companies (14%) have an end-to-end mobile friendly candidate experience, from career site homepage to job search to apply process
• 333 companies (67%) have campus-specific messaging and content to attract student interns and first-time job seekers
• Technology, Financials and Health Care are the sectors with the highest percentage of companies earning an “A” or “B” for Recruitment Marketing, with Energy and Retail earning high marks for their use of mobile recruiting
  The Wholesalers sector had the highest percentage of companies earning a “D” or “F”

“A recruiter’s job is to convert applicants into hires. A recruitment marketer’s job comes first: to attract leads and convert them into applicants, giving recruiters more qualified applicants to source from,” said Mike Hennessy, Founder and CEO, SmashFly. “Talent acquisition teams large and small can learn from the 134 companies on this year’s Fortune 500 list that are proactively building talent pipelines using best-practice Recruitment Marketing principles. Combining inbound Recruitment Marketing with outbound recruiting is how modern recruiting organizations will gain an edge competing for great hires.”

Methodology

In July-August 2015, SmashFly conducted in-depth analysis of the career websites of the 2015 Fortune 500 to understand their use of Recruitment Marketing practices. Practices assessed were publicly available via the Internet and covered 13 categories, spanning Messaging by Job Category to a Mobile Friendly candidate experience (homepage, job search and apply). For each category, a numerical point value of 3, 2 or 1 was given, based on assessment of the importance of that Recruitment Marketing practice. Points were tabulated for each company to form a score, and the total score was translated into a grade. A complete Methodology is found in the Report.

About SmashFly Technologies

SmashFly’s award-winning Total Recruitment Marketing Platform enables talent acquisition teams to find, attract, engage, nurture and convert candidates into qualified applicants using a centralized management system that automates and measures recruiting strategies and programs. Customers use SmashFly to unite their previously disconnected recruiting tools into an integrated software platform for Job Distribution, Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), Talent Networks, mobile-responsive and SEO-optimized Career Sites, Employee Referrals, Social Recruiting and Recruiting Analytics. Used to target pre-applicants in the front-end of the talent acquisition process, SmashFly integrates with any applicant tracking system (ATS) to provide unparalleled, real-time analytics on the sources that produce the best hires for the organization. Learn more at smashfly.com and follow us on Twitter @SmashFly.

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Media Contact Chris Brablc, SmashFly Technologies, +1 518-209-3005, [email protected]