With so many Millennials being on a full-time job-hunting mission and another estimated 60% barely hanging on to an employer before hoping to the next one (Gallup, 2017), employers should find it relatively easy recruiting a candidate who suits their budget and skills gap. At least that is what the law of demand posits; that if supply outstrips demand, prices, not the quality of produce (labor, in this context), plummets. Paradoxically, the labor market is one of those isolated cases that would still have employers craning to find a suitable hire simply because there are so many people out of whom to make a pick. The battle is only about to intensify with the shifting hiring landscape as Millennials continue to stream into the labor market. This research paper advances human resource knowledge by recognizing the reality that the potential employees from this generation contrast older folks in so many ways worth factoring in the recruitment process. Recruiting effective employees requires new approaches because today’s potential new hires increasingly fall under the generational cohort of Millennials, a group that harbors radically different views of the workplace and are elusive enough to escape through the crevices in traditional approaches to recruiting.
Recruitment is the process that employers use to locate, identify, and attract prospective employees - those exhibiting specific skills, abilities, and personal characteristics relative to existing human capital gap(s) in the hiring organization – and stimulate them to apply for those job openings (Bogatova, 2017; Sameen, 2016). While this definition creates an illusion that recruiting is an activity that instantly gratifies the firm’s short-term needs, Sharma (2009, p. 87) contends that it has profound implications since it influences the future and sustainable development of the company. Breaugh (2009) cautions that failure of the recruitment process can cause the company to attract applicants who may be unqualified, lacking diversity, and are likely to decline the job offer, compelling the employer to repeat the process after expending precious resources in futility. In other words, an organization’s recruitment efforts are critical in determining its success.
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Why Millennials
Millennials, those born between 1980 and 2000, are now entering employment in droves. They dominate each sector because of their sheer number and the fact that many of them have reached the ripe age for employment. In the United States, they are the largest generation accounting for 35% of the labor force (Fry, 2018). Statistical projections show that this generational cohort will account for 50% of the global workforce by 2022 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2011) and a whopping 75% by 2025 (Deloitte, 2014). Precisely, Millennials are pervasive, yet not nearly as many studies exist detailing how employers can pick the finest of them. Therefore, research into recruiting productive employees should pay considerable attention to this energetic, talent-rich generation.
Millennials are uniquely endowed with talents and abilities that can drive businesses to an unprecedented feat. Unfortunately, (potential) employees from this generation continue to defy most of the knowledge and beliefs that employers have long clung to regarding what an ideal employee should be and how to get them. PwC (2011) survey finds this generation to be highly talented and dynamic, but puzzling because what they want and expect from employer(s) and career often differs from their experience of the workplace. In other words, retaining talent from this group after going the whole hog to attract and recruit is an entirely a different and broad question that would be unfeasible to attempt addressing within the scopes of the present study. The bottom line is that Millennials have the potential to make great employees, but employers are often too timid to leap into such uncharted contours.
Millennials are undoubtedly different from their predecessors: Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. Their uniqueness sets the ground for a highly focussed debate into ways of aligning the hiring process and working environment to suit them. Winograd and Hais (2014) shed light on millennial employees in their recent study by outlining their four main distinguishing: they revere the environment, prefer gaining experience over material rewards, value corporate social responsibility, and tend to form a community based on a common interest. It is difficult to say conclusively whether (or not) these attributes are responsible for rendering the best from this group, as PwC (2011) posits, hard to find and even harder to retain. Nonetheless, this snapshot profile of millennials makes them quite an attractive group to study, for the sake of enhancing knowledge about how employers can hire the finest of this group.
Research Objectives
This study aims to propose a practical, research-informed strategy for recruiting competent employees from the large pool of promising millennials.
The definition of recruitment offered in this paper shows that recruitment is a complex but inevitable process. Due to the centrality of recruitment as a management function, Breaugh (2009) dissects it into a four-step model, for ease of comprehension (see Figure 1).
Recruitment Objectives
Recruitment begins with developing objectives. This initial stage is the foundation of the entire process; it forms the basis for the recruitment strategy and establishes the standard for all the remaining three stages (Hubschmid, 2013). In this step, the employer clarifies pre-hire, post-hire, and post-hiring goals (Bogatova, 2017). Objectives to be defined this early include the number of vacancies; when to fill them; who can best fill the openings (their diversity, level of education, values, skills, abilities, interest, and knowledge); the number of applicants that will optimize the employer’s chances of landing the best candidates; as well as job performance goals and retention rate for the new-hires. In short, this phase allows the employer to define the job role and determine who should be hired.
Developing a profile of the suitable candidate for the job seems a basic activity, but it poses a significant challenge to many companies, which partly explains their unpleasant experience with Millennials. The recruiter can speed up the recruitment process by keeping accurate job descriptions for each position in the organization. Job descriptions should reflect careful thought and communicate to the potential applicants what roles they will fill if hired, the skills sets that resonate with the posts, personality attributes that will contribute to completing tasks within their roles, and the experience (if any) that may help them to stand out from competitors.
Some unscrupulous employers circumvent this procedure by deceiving job seekers. Consequently, they attract outcomes that foment their prejudice for and negative stereotypes about Millennials. For example, Forbes details some sneaky tactics companies use to make their job openings seem more attractive than they are in reality (Ryan, 2017). As a result, they end up expending considerable amounts of money and time only for some candidates who were initially interested in the positions to withdraw as the hiring process unfolds (Breaugh, 2009). Perhaps this explains why PwC (2011) finds inconsistencies between what Millennials, who are obviously younger than the cohorts they are commonly contrasted against, unfairly (Fry, 2017), such as Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, “want and expect from their employer and career and their experience of the workplace” (p. 26). Indeed, success at recruiting Millennials anchors on knowing whom among them the recruiter wants.
A practical tip to identify the best of this generation is to develop a model of an ideal employee depending on internal metrics. The employer can compile a ‘success profile’ using the previously developed job description as a yardstick. An excellent idea of hacking this seemingly vague undertaking is to identify top performers in the department where a vacancy needs filling. After profiling everyone, identify skills and attributes that the top performers possess but missing in others below them and use the findings to develop a basis for hiring suitable employees.
Recruitment Strategy
The apparent overlap between this and the previous step underscores their continuity and interrelatedness. This phase requires the recruiter to establish a specific plan of action for attaining the objectives determined previously. The image below (Figure 1) shows some questions that the hiring firm should ask at this stage.
The above questions are not only instrumental in finding a candidate with the most suitable skills for the job, but also doing so at the tight time. However, the questions are numerous and broad, thus challenging to answer and compile the answers to develop a clear picture. As such, many studies recommend approaching this stage from the perspective of the talent acquisition supply chain (Breaugh, 2009; Keller & Cappelli, 2014). Supply chain concepts apply to recruitment because the action plan the recruiter develops will ultimately influence the quantity and quality of applicants as well as their availability and actual performance upon hiring. For instance, a choice to hire students on part-time basis may hinge on their availability, whether they have the right skillset to perform the role in question, and how well they will perform when they are offered the job.
A recruiter should apply concepts from the talent acquisition supply chain to understand the process from the applicant’s perspective, too. This position allows the employer to gain a better understanding of how the potential candidate views each recruitment decision relative to the entire process. Therefore, the recruiter should introspect whether (or not) the employer brand/reputation is appealing enough to attract the frequently cited benefits (see Lievens & Slaughter, 2016). Cascio and Graham (2016) warn HR professionals against using generic messages (such as “Join Our Team”) because they blur the boundary between one hiring firm and a competitor. Instead, taglines conveying employer brand should include something that ignites interest in these technology nerds, and be promoted predominantly on social media tools. Besides the above considerations, Bogatova (2017) emphasizes the need to consider the budget allocated to the entire process before moving to the next recruitment stage.
According to Bogatova (2017), carefully thought out action plan (recruitment strategy) enhances the success of subsequent steps. The author adds that adopting the right combination of recruitment activities in line with a clear action plan helps the recruiter to achieve desirable pre- and post-hire outcomes. The rest of the paper explores the latter stages in detail.
Attracting Applicants: Recruitment Sources
The meaning of recruitment sources varies contextually, albeit slightly. In some contexts, the term is recognized as the segment(s) of the labor market from where one can find potential applicants (Rothmann & Cooper, 2015, p. 137). In other settings, it refers to the ways through which a recruiter creates awareness regarding the job vacancy among prospective candidates (Bogatova 2017). The present study leans towards the latter. These sources were initially subsumable into three categories consisting of walk-ins, internal and external sources (see Wanous, 1992), but most human resource management literature of the 21st century recognize the last two categories writ large (e.g., Bogatova 2017; Breaugh, 2009; DeVaro & Morita, 2013; Sharma, 2009) with walk-ins subsumed under external recruitment sources. Figure 2 below is a pictorial summary of sources under the two primary recruitment sources.
Due to the strengths and weaknesses of each source, it is vital that a recruiter decides which option is most suitable depending on the uniqueness of each organization. For example, if the resources are limited or the recruiter has an opening that requires the expertise of a retired or former employee who is willing to return to the firm, it would be advisable for the recruiter to follow the internal recruitment route.
The choice of which or what proportion of the recruitment sources to employ affects all other recruitment processes. Notably, the employer brand message changes with the type of targeted audience. For instance, Sengupta, Bamel, and Singh (2015) suggest changing the tagline according to the age and source of recruits. According to these authors, internal employer branding should be organized around half a dozen factors (including justice, esteem, comfort, and employee engagement values) and customized according to the age of target applicants. Conversely, external employer branding should focus on five values, namely pride, reference, work culture, job structure, in addition to image and fundamental values.
Sourcing the finest of Millennials internally
With Millennials already accounting for 35 percent of the workforce and counting, it is justified to contend that the best of them can be found internally when a vacancy arises. The existing workforce of the recruiting enterprise, employee referrals, previous applicants, and former employees are the internal options for a recruiter. After Pew Research Center debunked the myth that Millennials chronically job-hop, stressing that job-hopping is a tendency associated with young people of all generations (Fry, 2017), employers should know that a merited upgrade, transfer, promotion, or demotion of employees from the organization, including Millennials, when a position arises is in order. Those already on the payroll of the organization can be made aware of the vacancy through e-mail, in person, or internal advertisement.
Internal recruitment, mainly employee referrals, has many advantages that a recruiter would want to reap. These benefits range from reduced cost to increased morale and engagement. According to Hoffman (2017), compared to their non-referred counterparts, referred employees are relatively productive, record lower turnover, attract lower recruiting, and instigate “good homophily.” As Hoffman explains, good homophily benefits the firm by creating a pool of workers who are united by shared values, interests, or characteristics that are desirable to the company. Indeed, the opening of the essay identified one essential attribute of Millennials to be the tendency to identify with a community glued by a common interest. Impliedly, armed with a success profile of an ideal candidate, a recruiter can use the referral system to recruit the best talent at 70% off the usual recruitment cost through other sources (Rashmi, 2010, p. 36 cited in Bogatova, 2017). Therefore, internal sources allow even small companies that are usually restrained by a stringent budget to tap into the talent-rich Millennial employees.
Using internal sources to tap the best of Millennial talent is undoubtedly not the elixir of an organization’s skills gap problems. For example, internal sources suffer a severe limitation of choice; gathering a large pool of talent from which to choose the best is sometimes not possible, especially in small organizations using this approach. With these sources, it is difficult to focus the recruitment exercise on the job, not an individual. Biasedness may only make it easy to award the job to the wrong person, causing conflict and insufficiency throughout the firm (Ekwoaba, Ikeije, & Ufoma, 2015). Also, lack of fresh blood into the company, a direct consequence of inbreeding, accentuates complacency, conformity to the status quo, and discourages creativity (Amadu, 2014; Shekhawat, 2019) – grave vices in the highly competitive and tumultuous business environment of today. Internal sources should not be used in isolation when filling all vacancies for they can exacerbate the company’s problems.
Recruiting Millennials through External Sources
The rapidly rising number of Millennials in the local and global workforce implies that employers are increasingly rummaging through the haystack to find excellent employees from outside the company. External sources, pictured in figure 2 above, have been extensively studied and are discussed in-depth in Bogatova’s (2017) thesis. This paper will not boast an informed regurgitation of such achievement, but it argues in favor of tweaking the recruitment methods – ways of establishing contact with a potential candidate – when the target audience is primarily Millennial.
In this age of technology, recruitment cannot be viewed as a transactional process. Scholars such as Bogatova (2017) promote this arguably dated perspective; where an employer needs to place a brief, catchy, and comprehensive add and wait for interested candidates to apply. While this might have worked two decades ago, it may not yield the best result today. Since research has proven the success of Internet recruiting (Whitaker, Stevelink, & Fear, 2017), social networking sites rank as emerging trends in recruiting Millennials (Melanthiou, Pavlou, & Constantinou, 2015). Recruiters can still employ those time-tested recruitment methods by integrating them with mobile search opportunities. Likewise, recruiters could search on, say, LinkedIn for the talent that matches their success profile before contacting the preferred candidates directly .
Career choice is a two-way street and Millennials know and appreciate this better than their older, arguably timid generations. There is robust empirical evidence proving that Millennials welcome the type of personal interaction where the potential employer contacts them. In a 2016 LinkedIn survey, 66 percent of the surveyed 13,000 Millennials expressed great interest in talking to a recruiter, mainly to find out more about the company culture and values (Abbot, 2016). Clearly, individuals of this generation, despite being always on the lookout for shiny opportunities, will hesitate to apply for them due to inadequate information about the recruiting company and the role, as well as recruiters’ tendency of not responding to applications; all deterrents that can be eliminated by communicating in a language and means with which Millennials are most comfortable. According to Dalessandro (2018) and Roepe (2017), text messaging and website chats are ideal recruitment tools in this digital age.
Attracting applicants is an involved step because of the variables involved. As this section has emphasized, whether a recruiter is advertising a job position or pitching out to a potential candidate, the message should not only sell the job but also the business. Moreover, when targeting mass recruitment, an employer may find it beneficial to use an application form to ensure that the respondents provide only the information central to the position. After garnering a sufficient number of quality applicants, the next step is selecting the right candidate.
Selecting the right a Millennial for the Job
No single blueprint exists for the selection process. The criteria for selecting a suitable candidate are mostly dependent on the organization, type of job (requiring skilled or unskilled labor), recruitment source used, and other constraints. Recruiting unskilled labor in a casual position is not nearly as complicated as the background option. However, the selection process generally involves: “(1) initial screening interview, (2) completion of the application form, (3) employment tests, (4) comprehensive interview, (5) conditional job offer, (6) background investigation, (7) medical examination, and (8) permanent job offer” (Bogatova, 2017, p. 15). Selection methods are equally diverse, namely ability tests, personality tests, integrity tests, group situational tests, personal interviews, work simulation tests, assessment centers, and references. It is not necessary to use all these methods, but the recruiter must identify which one or what combination will be most effective in finding the best fit for the role at hand.
Thus far, much of what one should know when recruiting Millennials has been covered, but there certainly are other vital points to note. First, the timing of recruitment activities is vital for the success of the whole process. Appropriate timing of each recruitment activity, such as interviewing earlier in the year, attracts better quantity and quality recruits (Breaugh, 2009; Breaugh, 2013; Turban & Cable, 2003), possibly because people prefer reducing the uncertainty associated with job seeking (Becker, Connolly, & Slaughter, 2010). Besides, employers should respond to recruits’ concerns and questions promptly and keep them updated on where things stand throughout the process. It is crucial to know when to recruit. Likewise, it is good recruitment etiquette to acknowledge receipt of the application and inform the candidate when to expect a response, and when they do not qualify.
It is challenging to get the entire recruitment process right. Accordingly, it is advisable that the recruiting firm evaluates the whole process and reflects over it. This way, the firm can perfect its approach to this procedure. Therefore, evaluation should not end by grilling the candidate to determine how best they fit into the role, but also what lessons the HR professionals can learn from the process.
Conclusion
Recruiters can make the process efficient, effective, and fair when targeting Millennials by changing their approach to recruitment. This paper helps employers to learn more about their potential recruits and pick the best talent from representatives of this generation. As the article entails, recruiting effective employees involves four steps: establishing recruitment objectives, developing a strategy, carrying out recruitment activities, and evaluation. Employees are assets, and the majority of them will continue to be Millennials for the better of the 21 st century. With so many negative stereotypes about this generational cohort, employers remain skeptical to hiring them, and those who dare hardly know how to pick the best talent of this generation, thus stoking their disdain for this group. This document solves this problem by offering a new perspective to help employers land the best Millennial recruits.
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