How to Successfully Recruit Millennial Talent
According to a recent US Census Bureau study, millennials in the United States are now the nation’s largest living generation, overtaking Baby Boomers, and are set to surpass the 79 million mark by 2050.
What does this mean for you as an employer? Over the next several years as your business grows and changes, you’ll be tasked with hiring new employees, and most likely, those new employees will be (gasp!) millennials. Finding great employees is hard enough, but when you’re not confident in how to attract great employees that are also millennials, it makes the task even more tough. Tough, but not impossible, as long as you understand how the millennial employee brain works; empathizing with what’s important to them, recognizing what motivates them to apply, being in the places they look for jobs, and knowing what keeps them coming back to work every day.
We recently conducted a survey where we engaged with almost 3,300 Alabama millennials and asked them questions pertaining to everything from politics to purchase intentions to careers. What we uncovered was a goldmine of information about how millennials operate, but career wise, one of the most important things we learned was that Alabama millennials are largely motivated by competitive pay (81.11%), positive work environment (73.79%), work/life balance (71.82%), flexible work hours (64.74%), healthcare (63.89%) and career advancement opportunities (60.18%).
Being the most connected generation of our time, it should come as no surprise that 52% of millennial respondents use their professional networking skills to learn about job opportunities…whether it’s through friends (40.47%), LinkedIn (12.73%) or online job boards (28.93%).
And these are just a few of the stats we uncovered.
One of the biggest themes we found? The value that millennials place on workplace culture. As an employer, this means all eyes are on you as candidates search for a job. Luckily, you can showcase culture in a number of ways: by creating videos to pass along to potential candidates that show off your workplace, posting short blog posts on your website dedicated to your community causes and employee involvement, or staying current with social media channels and creating a personality around your brand that millennials can relate to (just to name a few). These are the types of things that will excite candidates and allow them to visualize themselves working in your company.
Want more information about our survey or how we can help you connect with AL’s best and brightest millennial candidates? Let’s talk.