5 Things Recruiters Should Offer While Hiring Millennials

In the contemporary corporate world, employers and recruiters are putting great emphasis on millennial hiring. Organizations acknowledge that millennials hold the key to their future success.

According to one article, by the end of 2025, millennials will account for 75 percent of the global workforce. Besides their quantitative representation in the workforce demographics, their skills are in high demand too.

Millennials display incredible creative intellect, innovation, analytical capabilities, and digital literacy qualities. Their enormous potential can make organizations far more competitive and agile. However, hiring extraordinary millennial talents in the job market can be quite a task for organizations. This is for the simple reason that millennials are rigid about what they expect from their jobs. They have great clarity of what they want from their employers.

This blog sheds light on some of the most significant dimensions of work culture that recruiters ought to offer to millennial candidates. By providing these benefits, organizations can have the best chance to have the top-class millennials on board.

5 Commitments Recruiters Should Make to Millennial Candidates 

1. Competitive Salaries 

Millennials have an uncompromising attitude regarding their expectations from their jobs. Among these anticipations, the thought of competitive salaries attracts most of them. Besides, millennials are savvy, and they have a thorough knowledge of the wages on offer in their work domain. 

PerGoRemotely , salary structure is one of the leading reasons behind high employee turnover among millennials. To substantiate, 21 percent of millennials change their jobs within one year of recruitment. Further, 36 percent of these quit their jobs searching for more competitive salaries. 

Having said that, if you want to recruit top-notch millennial talents, you ought to offer competitive salaries along with other benefits like insurance.

You have to make the candidates believe that you are offering the best remuneration to them as per industry standards. Moreover, if you can, you should also provide some attractive perks and incentives to candidates subject to their performance. 

You should simultaneously work on millennial hiring and retention tactics. From the purview of both, offering competitive salaries is an essential prerequisite. If you are keen on hiring the best millennial talents, it will come at a competitive price. Moreover, wages need to grow proportionately to improve employee retention rates.

2. The Abundance of Learning and Development Opportunities

It is intriguing to note that opportunities for growth and development matter more than wages for most millennials. According to areport by PwC, access to learning and development prospects in the workplace is the priority for most millennials.

For them, wages are secondary as they acknowledge the vitality of learning. To add, per Lorman , 87 percent of millennial employees believe that learning in the workplace is paramount.

Millennials have a knack for capitalizing on their abilities by subscribing to continuous learning. To add, they are often ecstatic to incorporate new skills, traits, and other dimensions of professionalism into their personality to streamline career advancement. Therefore, they usually look forward to the scope of reskilling and upskilling in the workplace.  

They are aware that they would have to learn a lot more than what their qualifications have taught them to thrive in the corporate world. They are keen on capitalizing on their learning abilities to become more competitive over time. Their exceptional and exemplary willingness to assimilate professional knowledge is one of their strongest attributes. 

Therefore, you ought to convince the millennial candidates that your organization will invest in their careers. You should explain to them the various ways your organization facilitates the learning and development opportunities for its employees. 

To do this, bring some innovation to employee development. You can initiate the following measures to captivate the interest of millennial talents that hold the key to the future. 

• Thoughtful mentorship programs 
• Integration of Learning Management Systems (LMS) 
• Remote training modules and skill enhancement programs 

Let millennial candidates know the scope of learning that is on offer during the application. You can also explain to them how your organization will work on developing their careers and the kind of growth they can achieve in the organization. If you have a well-defined roadmap for employee development, your job offers will seem far more intriguing. 

The greater the number of learning and development opportunities on offer, the higher the interest of millennial candidates in your organization.

Otherwise, they will gravitate more towards other organizations providing more significant opportunities for pivoting career skills by default. Ultimately, career advancement is salient to sincerity about their careers. You want the sincerest of them to add new value to your organization.

3. Flexible Working Arrangements and Autonomy

As clearly evident, flexibility and autonomy are two features of the flourishing remote working culture. Now that employees can work in flexible working arrangements, they do not want to look back at traditional workplace norms. Amongst millennials, such preference for flexibility and autonomy gets quite literal and rigid. 

They are even willing to take pay cuts for being entitled to flexible working styles. The implication of flexibility here includes flexible work timings, flexible deadlines, and flexible approaches. According to an article by SnackNation , 36 percent of employees are more than happy to give up $5,000 per year to be happier at work. This happiness in multidimensional ways is synonymous with flexibility. 

For millennials, such flexibility provides an ideal opportunity for maintaining a handsome work-life balance. To substantiate, per HBR,53 percent of millennials say that flexibility and autonomy are significant criteria for them while choosing an organization.

Millennials are way ahead of baby boomers and generation X employees regarding digital literacy. They understand that most dimensions of work can be carried out remotely, given the privilege of technological advancements. 

Millennial candidates will be more interested in working for organizations that offer flexible working. They also seek the autonomy to work with tools and methodologies that they deem suitable. If you are not offering that to them, they know that there are quite a good number of other companies that offer remote work. Telecommuting is the future of work and millennials know that well. 

The bottom line is that to attract millennial candidates, you need to offer at least some flexibility as a part of the organization’s culture. You need to present your company’s work environment as relaxing, supportive, vibrant, and driven by flexibility. As mentioned above, this may be a more significant attraction for millennials than other factors. Building a hybrid workplace culture  would hence be a great idea. 

4. Continuous Feedback Sharing

Feedback sharing is a critical component of performance management in any organization. Employees work well and take the organization’s progress further when receiving regular feedback from their superiors and team leaders. To validate, you should heed some vital workplace feedback statistics compiled by Hubspot . A few highlights of these crucial insights include:

• Companies that have regular feedback mechanisms exhibit around 15 percent lesser employee turnover than others 
• 98 percent of employees tend to show signs of disengagement when they receive little or no feedback from their seniors or team leaders.
• More than 43 percent of employees who portray active employee engagement receive feedback from managers and seniors at least once a week 
• As many as 65 percent of employers assert that they look forward to receiving more feedback from their seniors and leaders  

As you can see, feedback is one of the essential strategies for driving active engagement. In particular, millennials expect managers and employers to be more frequent with feedback sharing. According to theHarvard Business Review,  the expectation of feedback among millennial employees is 50 percent higher than that of their co-workers. 

You have to trigger interest in millennial candidates applying to your organization by laying great emphasis on feedback sharing. Assure them that their seniors and managers will be sensitive to their expectations of feedback, direction, and guidance. You ought to persuade them that they will receive adequate support from the management in terms of regular feedback and mentoring.

5. Freedom of Expression   

The last thing that millennials want is a subdued existence in the workplace. Millennials come with a charismatic charm and are driven by intrinsic motivation to pursue their passions. Furthermore, they want to have a fair share of liberty in the workplace to express themselves. These expressions may be in creativity, strong opinions, innovation, and thoughts. 

Millennials love to add value to their workplace by expressing their outside-the-box ideas. So, as a recruiter or a human resource manager, you should offer this proposition to millennial candidates. You can take an intelligent approach and keep mentioning how your organization promotes the notion of employees’ self-expression. You ought to tell them that your organization takes immense pride in being inclusive in attractive ways. 

To summarize, millennials are the future of the business world, and there are enough statistics to validate this assertion. Organizations that can employ the top millennial talents will have the best chance of excelling in the coming years. However, getting millennials on board may not be as simple as it seems at the onset. 

Millennials come with a broad spectrum of expectations from their jobs, and you may not have the choice but to deliver on them. The above strategies will give you the best chance to have the most capable and diligent millennials in your workforce. This is where you will decide the fate of your business to a large extent. 

Jessica Robinson is the Content & Outreach Manager at The Speaking Polymath.

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