Millennials, the fastest growing and fastest to leave generation in the workforce

Millennials are changing how organizations need to attract and retain employees. What you need to know so you don’t fall behind in the talent wars.

According to a 2016 study done by Deloitte, 64% of millennials in the United States expect to leave their current job. Other emerging markets have even a higher percentage, like India with 76% or Peru with 82%.

What does this mean for employers? While they can start implementing practices to try to retain talent, employers also need to maintain an active pool of talent, especially for hard-to-fill positions. This doesn’t mean maintaining a huge database of resumes, it means that employers must maintain up-to-date information on possible future candidates and continue to nurture them.

How to attract millennials

• Millennials should be able apply on a tablet or smartphone.
• Provide adequate information about your company and culture on your career site.
• Make it easy to look and apply for a job – think Amazon.com
• Provide a great experience - Millennials have grown up with companies that are differentiate themselves by providing a great experience, like Apple has with their stores. Career sites should be no different. Your career site may be the first interaction a person has with your brand so it makes sense to make create a great user experience.

Technology is here to help recruiters and talent acquisition professionals:

• Identify talent before they apply to build a larger talent pool.
• Measure candidate fit based on characteristics of good past employees.
• Measure candidate interest level based on their activities on your career site and responsiveness to nurture campaigns.
• Improve the appearance and accessibility of your career site
• Automatically update candidate information from Linkedin.
• Nurture candidates automatically via email based on things like experience, skills, and interests.

Here’s some tips for retaining millennial talent:

• Provide professional development, a mentor could also help.
• Hire talent that share the organizations values.
• Provide a good work/life balance.
• Measure performance based on completing goals, not number of hours worked.
• Provide direction for a career path – 45% said they would quit a job if they didn’t see a career path.
• Provide feedback - 42% want feedback every week (that is over 2x the percentage of every other generation.
• Show them you care about employees. An easy way to do this is to give employees off on their birthday.