How to Hire Millennials
Reading another article with ‘millennial’ in its title usually makes me want to roll my eyes and wonder what industry we’ve ruined now. But working in the HR industry has taught me just how different we really are for recruiters. Many of them have had to quickly adapt their hiring practices or fall behind in quality talent acquisition.
Just to start, compared to our previous generations we care more about the company culture, the work-life balance and independence. This resonates with us because we’ve seen our parents work in fields with inflexible work hours or unstable jobs.
Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University has this to say on the matter : “They’ve watched what’s happened to the generations before them and they see the problems that might come ahead, they’re saying there’s more to life than work, and that they want a satisfying life as well.”
So as a recruiter what can you do to find quality candidates for your company? Jacob Talon from Sparkhire has some great insight on this “Millennials are driven by many things, but here’s what I call the 3 P’s: Purpose, Path, and Progress.”
The 3 P’s
For purpose, you want to be as authentic as possible, ensure that you clearly communicate the job requirements and responsibilities and be transparent in what you expect from your employees and help them understand their role in the company.
Clearly outline a career path for them to follow, showing them that they have room to grow within the organisation and finally for progress they look to you , they want to see how the company is doing, is it constantly growing or has it stagnated? Ensure that you have plans in place that you can show what the company will be like 5 years down the line.
How to find hidden talent
You will also need to look internally at your company and make sure that your social media platforms are active and engaging, as the children of the internet, millennials get a sense of a company based on how they interact online
Also know your hunting ground. If you’re looking for a more specialised role like a developer, websites like github and stackoverflow would be a good place to find candidates. Similarly, sites like artstation would be a great recruiting ground for artists and designers.
Once you’ve found some prospective hires. Next it comes to scheduling that interview. Don’t start with a phone call. Reach out by text or e-mail to set it up. In fact, on our platform, vitay.io we saw that 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes of receiving them and the average response time was within a day. This is because millenials are far more likely to respond to a text and often avoid calls from numbers they don’t know.
The job market is constantly changing, now is the time to get your teams ready for the challenge and happy recruiting!
Photo by Buro Millennial from Pexels
