Genuine Parts Company
Since Genuine Parts Company was founded in 1928, the organization has grown as rapidly as the number of independent car repair garages and shops around the world. Now 50,000 employees strong, today GPC is a leading distributor of automotive parts, industrial parts, and business products across the globe. To maintain this blistering pace amid record-low unemployment, GPC’s recruiting team depends on innovative tools to attract and move candidates through the hiring funnel at breakneck speed.
From old school to new wave recruiting tools
Like most older organizations today navigating the increasingly digital world, the GPC team found that modernizing their workflows and updating tools was a serious challenge. “We have historically been ‘old school’ in many ways,” said Kirk Allan, Vice President of HR Operations & Compliance at GPC. “We realized that we had to embrace digital across the board, particularly in the recruiting process, in order to compete.”
From sluggish legacy software that made it difficult to interact with applicants, to a complicated hiring portal and application process that led to candidate drop-off, GPC needed to give its recruiting machine a tune-up. After doing some homework on several recruiting software platforms, GPC ultimately chose Jobvite to bring hiring operations up to speed with the most innovative tools available — to source, attract, and connect with new talent, and get them through the hiring process faster than ever.
Jobvite overhauls hiring
GPC’s global business is a well-oiled machine, and relies on a wide variety of employees — from retail CSRs to drivers to warehouse workers — to keep that engine running smoothly. While record-low unemployment figures are great signs for the booming economy, it has made the lives of talent acquisition pros (like the folks at GPC) a lot more challenging day-to-day.
In today’s competitive labor market, candidates expect a faster, simpler application experience — and will readily abandon any requisitions that are unintuitive, take too long, or are too complex. That’s why GPC brought on Jobvite: to remove as many barriers as possible from the moment someone starts an application, so they don’t click away. Through the Jobvite platform, Allan says GPC has made the process less time-consuming and more productive for both applicants and hiring teams.
Jobvite has also allowed GPC to launch its first-ever creative recruitment marketing and social media campaigns, as well as use tools like texting, to reach candidates where they are and help drive even more traffic and applications, Allan explained.
“There is a clear correlation that our applicant traffic has gone up double-digits since we started using Jobvite,” said Allan. “We had never really established ourselves from a recruiting standpoint on social media before, doing so with tools like Jobvite CRM and Intelligent Messaging have driven outstanding results in our recruiting processes.”
Shifting into the next gear
With Jobvite, the company has been able to launch a series of targeted hiring campaigns, streamline the application and hiring process, communicate with candidates via text, and recruit on social media for the first time.
This comprehensive, multi-channel approach to recruiting had helped GPC increase the number of applicants by 20% year-over-year and decrease time-to-fill on average by 2-3 days — shortening the hiring cycle in what has been a far more challenging job market for most recruiting shops.
“When all the economic indicators point to hiring being more difficult, we’ve been even more successful,” said Allan.
Allan says that Jobvite has allowed GPC to shift their hiring strategy into top gear.
“If you’re simply maintaining speed, then you’re going to fall way, way behind,” said Allan. “The only way to stay competitive is to adopt the most innovative toolkit so you can race ahead at a very fast pace. Jobvite has now given us the ability to do this.”
Genuine Parts Company Evolved their Recruitment Marketing
Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Framework helps TA teams deliver world-class results. From initial assessment to specific action plans, Evolve empowers TA leaders to identify and prioritize areas for improvement so that no effort is wasted. Teams, processes, technologies, and strategies are optimized over time, and organizations emerge stronger, more efficient, and better able to adapt to the needs of the ever-evolving talent marketplace.
The Evolve framework offers four levels of talent acquisition maturity. Companies like Genuine Parts Company can increase from a level 2 to a level 3 by consistently being more proactive about their recruitment marketing and sourcing
About Genuine Parts Company
Genuine Parts Company, founded in 1928, is a global service organization engaged in the distribution of automotive and industrial replacement parts. The Company serves hundreds of thousands of customers from a network of more than 10,000 locations in 14 countries and has approximately 50,000 employees.
