As the millennial generation enters the workforce in greater numbers now than ever before, employers need to shift their attention to how to recruit this new talent. The recruitment strategies that used to work may not be enough to entice millennials, who care more about following their passions and making a way for themselves in the world than conforming to existing structures. However, if your company is going to have longevity, you’ll need to capture the attention of millennials and incorporate them into your company.
Use Informal Recruiting Strategies
Millennials are tech savvy and personally connected, and they generally don’t mesh well with traditional recruiting strategies. They often won’t post their résumés online and won’t respond to corporate recruiters, who they fear are trying to sell them short. Instead, they want to find out about open positions through their networks.
Focus your attention on connecting with millennials through LinkedIn and Twitter and letting them know about open positions. You can also build a strong referral culture into your business, especially once you get a few millennials in the door.
Consider Your BYOD Policy
Millennials love their technology, and many of them won’t be happy if they can’t use their awesome new smartphones (the iPhone5 should be ringing a bell right about now) for work projects. Therefore, your company should develop a BYOD (bring your own device) policy that millennials will appreciate.
This may require some infrastructure changes on your end. In particular, you’ll want to secure all communications between the employee’s personal phone and your company servers. This will keep your information secure and your millennials happy.
Keep Older Generations in the Loop
As you get more millennials into your company, you may be tempted to shift more of your systems to cater to their techie instincts. However, when you do this, be careful to not isolate older generations. For example, some companies use internal social networks for communication instead of email. However, for older generations who didn’t grow up on Facebook, this can be a tough change.
As you incorporate millennials into your company, keep older technology around as well so you don’t give millennials an unfair edge over your older, and potentially more loyal, employees.
Hold Millennials With an Open Hand
Even if you do everything right, you’ll find you have a pretty high turnover with millennials. The days of staying at the same company for several decades are long gone, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you only keep most of your employees for a couple of years. Because of this, you need to have a strong onboarding program for new employees to get them up to speed, and have an idea of where you’ll draw new hires from when you have a position to fill.
Despite all of the changes your company has to make to attract and incorporate millennials, you’ll find that your efforts are well worth it. This generation of young people brings a lot of energy and innovation to the workplace. They won’t be afraid to point out ways your company is lagging behind and come up with solutions to push you forward in today’s marketplace.
About the author: Dawn Altnam lives and works in the Midwest, and she writes on behalf of Scale Computing. After furthering her education, she has spent some time researching her interests and blogging of her discoveries often.
Handshake Photo via Shutterstock
