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.
• Make your unappealing ATS look modern and assessable on mobile devices – many ATSs suffer from old designs. Companies, including Phenom People can reskin your existing ATS, including the application process to give your career site a modern look and feel.
• 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.