Josh TolanIn the 12th episode of The Recruiting Reel, Jacob Shriar from Officevibe discusses how organizations must adapt their hiring process for millennials. Here’s the transcript:
Josh Tolan: My name is Josh Tolan and I’m the CEO of Spark Hire, the leading video interviewing platform used by thousands of organizations around the world.
And this is The Recruiting Reel, a video series in which we discuss real recruiting challenges with prominent recruiting experts to provide you with actionable tips you can apply to your own recruiting.
I am thrilled to introduce today’s featured expert, Jacob Shriar, the Director of Content at Officevibe – a provider of employee engagement software that helps people enjoy work.
Jacob runs one of the most successful blogs in the HR community over at Officevibe. It covers topics such as employee appreciation, company culture, productivity, and more. It’s one of my personal favorite blogs so I was geeked when Jacob wanted to come on The Recruiting Reel.
Jacob is very in-tune with modern talent strategies and has produced a lot of content related to millennials so we asked him how organizations should be adapting their hiring process for millennials and this what he had to say…
Jacob Shriar: Hi, I’m Jacob Shriar, the Director of Content at Officevibe. And the reason why I think you have to adjust your hiring process for millennials is because they’re a different type of generation. They react differently than what most people react to in the hiring process.
Millennials care much more about culture, engagement, work life balance, and autonomy. So, as a hiring manager, you really need to address those issues in all of your messaging. You need to be showing them in a very transparent way:
- How do you adjust for those types of things?
- How do you offer those types of things?
What millennials are looking for is to attach themselves to a company they can actually care about and be passionate about. The key thing for you to do is to show that through your social media postings and the message you send across in your employer brand.
The best piece of advice I can give you by far is be authentic and be transparent. Millennials have a very good way of figuring out whether or not you’re transparent.
Obviously you want to be active on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and things like that. Some recruiters are even doing cool things on other social media platforms like Snapchat and Periscope.
I’d also recommend looking into more niche websites depending on the type of profile you’re looking for.
So as an example, if you’re looking for developers, you might want to check out websites like Stack Overflow and Github versus a traditional job board or LinkedIn because they might be spending more time there.
Same for a marketing person. Maybe you want to go to a website like inbound.org or growthhackers.com.
What’s important is when you go to these types of websites, you don’t just post blindly: “Hey, we’re hiring. Come join our company!”
You really want to build an authentic relationship with these people. So take your time to actively post in the community and respond to conversations. Don’t post those types of aggressive hiring messages.
Some of the key takeaways for recruiters to attract millennials:
- Find those niche websites and social media platforms that you can exploit
- Don’t be aggressive and blast out a hiring message
- Take your time to build your employer brand through story-telling
- Be transparent about what it’s like to work at your company through photos and videos and whatever you can to show candidates what their day-to-day might be like there
Again, going back to those original concerns that millennials have:
- What is the work life balance like?
- How much autonomy will they have?
- What are the types of projects will they be working on?
The two keywords here that you need to take away from this are authenticity and transparency.
I think with that you’ll really start to attract some all star millennial talent.
Josh Tolan: Jacob, you delivered again! Awesome advice on how to recruit millennials. I’m really glad you mentioned authentic storytelling.
Millennials are driven by many things, but here’s what I call the 3 P’s: Purpose, Path, and Progress.
When recruiting millennials, you need to convey their purpose within the organization and its vision. Why are they doing what they’re doing?
Next, millennials want excitement. They want a career path. So what are the opportunities and how can they get there?
Lastly, millennials have grown up in a super fast-paced world in which things are constantly changing. They’re used to this and will be looking at the progression of your organization. Showcase how your organization has innovated, what new things it has implemented, and what the plans are moving forward.
If you can deliver, through a variety of channels, an authentic story focused on the 3 P’s, you’re on your way to attracting millennial talent.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Jacob Shriar for coming on the show today. Everyone should head over to officevibe.com to learn about some of the cool things they’re doing over there around employee engagement and of course, to check out the awesome content that Jacob is creating. Follow Jacob on Twitter @JacobShriar and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Thank you for watching The Recruiting Reel and stay tuned for more episodes. For additional HR and recruiting content, head over to hr.sparkhire.com and subscribe. Also, follow us on Twitter, @sparkhire. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the newest episodes of The Recruiting Reel.
Thanks again for watching and happy recruiting!
