Most Fortune 500 companies don't know how to market themselves well to jobseekers, a new report claims.
SmashFly, a recruiting marketing platform, analyzed the ways America's biggest companies seek to attract talent and assessed their methods based on 36 criteria.
The conclusion: The average Fortune 500 company gets a C in recruitment. Only a third of the companies examined received an A or a B, according to SmashFly's grading rubric and only 4 percent were deemed "exceptional."
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Twenty-three percent of the corporations — 123 companies overall — were given Ds or Fs. Car companies were disproportionately represented in this group, with more than half of car manufacturers and auto parts makers getting a failing or near-failing marks.
Among the most common knocks against recruitment strategies is that they don't allow potential job candidates to opt into a talent network or system of job alerts unless they have already applied for a job. Ideally, anybody who is interested in working for a given company should be able to easily sign up for email notifications about open positions, for instance.
Another frequent shortcoming from major companies is that they don't cultivate leads "with consistent, personalized communication."
Finally, companies that hope to attract the best and the brightest should be creating and sharing more online content that isn't tied to a specific job opening with the goal of engaging smart people with their organization.
"The nation's largest organizations are getting more sophisticated and becoming more successful by integrating digital marketing, content marketing, mobile and social into their recruiting strategies," Mike Hennessy, founder and CEO of SmashFly, tells the Society for Human Resource Management.
There are some basics, however, that the Fortune 500 has figured out. Search engine optimization, for instance: 94 percent of America's top companies say their career pages appear at the top of a Google search result for their brand. Eighty-three percent say that their jobs-oriented social media accounts share content besides job openings.
Recent research has suggested that mobile apps are taking over traditional online job boards as the favored place for young workers to find new careers. That is in line with general trends in how Americans are consuming digital content, but it's an area in which many large companies are falling behind.
Only 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies' recruitment marketing was judged to be "mobile-friendly" by SmashFly, nevertheless an improvement over the 14 percent that were in 2014.
Howie Schwartz, CEO of Crowded, a jobs platform that boasts more than 60,000 candidates, told HR Drive last year that organizations have to orient their hiring mentality to "mobile first."
"This means having a simple, not at all daunting apply page that candidates can access and complete in under five minutes from their mobile device," he said.
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