MILLENNIALS SERIES, PART 7 – THE RECRUITING QUESTIONS WITH NO ANSWERS AND NO HISTORY – WHAT CAREER TRACKS AND WORK HISTORY WOULD BE DESIRABLE AS PREPARATION FOR THIS NEWLY CREATED POST?

Judith Cushman All Posts, Millennials 0 Comments

Answer: Knowing that my client wished to hire a manager with both the hands-on and managerial capabilities, would I be able to find that talent given the immature marketplace for SM professional? What would I learn about Millennials and how their values would affect their decision-making?

How could I present this opportunity in a way that would be appealing to Millennials? Would they be interested in future growth and stock incentives? Would candidates be capable of providing strategic counsel and building for the long-term?

As I was thinking about these issues, all of which quickly surfaced in this search, I discovered an article in the Puget Sound Business Journal titled, “Rethink Recruiting for Millennials” (Gonzalo Aguero, founder of recruiting tech firm Worcket.) He said, “Recruiting Millennials is harder, slower and more inefficient than ever. Millennials tend to resist what feels to them like an unnatural experience. This is a technology savvy demographic, one in which traditional recruiting methods often don’t resonate.

“Yet recruiters continue to rely on traditional hiring tactics, which include making prospects sift through long vague job descriptions and sending resumes that tend to go into a dark hole, with rarely any type of response…Reaching this growing segment, however, has been a challenge for many employers…It is evident that this system is not working. If companies want to tap into the Millennial generation, they must take a new approach to recruiting.”

This was precisely what my experience was as I approached potential candidates that I thought would be immediately responsive to my proposition. There was a quick response to the first contact but their attention wandered as the follow-up information was too vague for them to visualize themselves in the job—and they wanted to know if the pay (not benefits) were excellent. I lost them by the second call.

In the next post read about how the recruiting strategy changed and what worked.

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