22 Nov Talent Marketing: Steps to Attract Millennials

The tides are turning. Bersin put it succinctly in his 2018 Human Capital Trends Report: “The power of the individual is growing, with millennials at the forefront.
Employer demand is going up, while candidate supply is on its way down. With this shift in power candidates now have greater freedom to move between companies and cherry pick their next employer.

We can no longer just post a job listing on our careers site and expect them to come to us. So, we need a strategy to attract millennials to your organisation and keep them alive in the pipeline.

Step 1: Build your employer brand

Millennials are not making job selections based on salary alone; they want to work with people and a company whose values resonate with them. They want to learn about your company, your culture, and your employees before even applying, and this is becoming easier with the abundance of peer to peer review sites such as Glassdoor.

We need to weave our employer value proposition into an authentic story that shows off our culture and provides a realistic job preview to attract millennials. Marketing this message on our careers page is a great start, but we need to extend the reach much further. We have to market our brand and engage them at the point they are doing their research, so it’s now just as important to extend the visibility to a variety of channels such as social media. And thanks to that what was once only feasible for huge companies with big marketing budgets has now become accessible for SMBs.

Step 2: Communicate in a two-way street

Employer branding isn’t just one-sided, it should be a conversation. If we leave dead time before getting back to candidates, they may just pursue opportunities elsewhere. This is especially true for millennials who were raised on immediate gratification.
As such, it’s essential to reach out to candidates throughout the entire hiring process, from confirming the receipt of an application or resume to checking in throughout the decision-making process.

With the rise of recruiting CRMs, companies now have greater visibility into their pipeline and are able to tap into their passive candidate pool. But if you have an understaffed recruiting team or you’re managing high-volume jobs, it’s tough to juggle and email the hundreds or thousands of prospects in a timely manner, creating an unscalable, poor experience.
Thankfully there are multiple forms of communication channels as well as tools to automate personalized responses. In today’s hyperconnected world social media and text are scalable and immediate channels that work well with the Millennial audience.

Step 3: Source from your candidate pipeline

This is all about realizing long-term ROI. Because 52 percent of people who apply to a job are under-qualified, it is more important than ever before to maintain a pipeline filled with talented candidates.

This problem creates an opportunity. Although only 36 percent of the workforce is actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, an incredible 90 percent is willing to talk and learn more. Our mindset should switch from recruiting to fill an open position to anticipating who your company will want and should hire in the future. Move away from reactive to proactive recruiting

All your hard work attracting a large pool of candidates and leaving those who don’t receive an offer on positive note can be leveraged. Deliver actionable feedback to those that don’t make the cut and encourage reapplication. For instance, you can rediscover the talent that was already in your system, match them with new roles, and then automatically create personalized outreach to them. This way you can maintain an ongoing relationship with talented candidates who may still be in the market in the near future or somewhere down the line.

The best and brightest are in such high demand that it’s necessary to be more strategic if you want to win them for your team. When the competition for top-tier talent is high, you have to be proactive in your methods to attract millennials to find the caliber of candidates you need for your organization to succeed.