How To Recruit And Retain Millennials

Have you found it challenging to recruit and retain Millennials? Well, today on Hero TV, we’ve got Sydne Jacques who’s the Guru is going to teach us all about this. Hey everybody its Sydne Jacques and today I’m here to talk to you about how to recruit and retain Millennials. So I have an opportunity in my engineering business it will do a lot of different things but one of the things that I really enjoy is for the last about two and a half years, I’ve had the opportunity to serve on our AGC or associated general contractors volunteer task force and the group that I work with is called the Workforce Development Committee. So basically, our goal is to try and figure out how do we bring more workers into construction. So obviously that means we’re talking about Millennials. I want you to know how serious we are about this, this is a report that we just recently got back on our committee of pages and pages and pages of research that we’ve paid public relations firm and a research company to help us figure out how can we be better at recruiting and retaining Millennials. So it’s an important issue for many many companies and probably for yours I’m guessing. So as we think about how to recruit and retain Millennials, we need to go back to what I call the influence model So the basic steps of the influencer model are if I want to have influence on someone so in this situation I’m the leader of my company and I want to influence people who don’t yet work for me to consider working for me. So what I need to do is I need to create a really clear message to them of what are the advantages of coming to work for my company. I need to be really clear and you’ve probably seen one of my videos where I talk about the 5 f’s. These advantages could have to do with the financial situation, they could have to do with the fulfillment or the food that you offer at your company as a perk or the freedom that you offer or the future that they could see with your company. And so you need to be really clear in crafting that message as you share that. And then you need to stop and say that’s what I call the with them. What’s in it for me if I were that millennial considering working at your company, I would be asking what’s in it for me? and that’s where you need to tie in your message to make sure that it’s really clear that you’ve thought about them and what they want. And then at that point you need to teach them how to think about you utilizing your message and then give them a specific challenge maybe that challenge is to go online and check out your website. Maybe that challenge is to come to work for a day with somebody that works for you and just check it out and see what it’s like. It’s really interesting when I was working volunteering on this Workforce Development Committee and one of the things that we do is we evaluate people that apply for scholarships that are looking for money for scholarships through construction. And every single person that had turned in a scholarship application told this story about a mentor. Somebody that had taken them out to a job site. One of them there was a girl and it was her uncle had taken her out to a construction site and just being out there she got so excited and she was like I love to be outside I love to work with my hands I think I’m interested in going into construction. There was one boy who his Scout leader had taken him out and shown him how cool it was on a construction site. So we need to figure out how can we be mentors and give people a taste for our company and what it is that we want to bring them to. However, however you can do that. Give them a tour, have them come Job Shadow for a half a day but give them that taste and let them take advantage and see what it’s really like. So in this research study I just want to share one page with you that I thought it was interesting. So one of the things in our big research studies that we talked about was, what motivates Millennials to stay in their job? So once we recruit them, we want to retain them, we want to keep them there. We all know it’s a tremendous cost when we have to turnover employees. So what motivates them to stay in their job? compensation. That’s no big surprise right? Opportunity for growth. Okay I know a lot of times we talk about Millennials and people say well they show up and they think that next week they should be the boss. Alright there are different perceptions but this is where we need to have these open lines of communication and make sure that we really understand because you know what? the olden days where you show up to one job and you work there for 40 years and you know that you’re going to retire from there, as a company, as most companies that’s not the norm anymore. So we can’t blame that on the employees. Part of it is comes back to what do we offer as a company? are we offering that long-term future for them? So they want opportunities for growth ,they want enjoyment of working in their career, they want to know that it’s a great place to work. They want job stability. Now it is interesting because across the board, Millennials have much shorter periods of work on average. But you know what? that’s not always a disadvantage because as they come there, they’re motivated. Many times they want to learn, they want to grow, they want to help you add value while they’re there. And then the last one is feeling valued as an employee. This is one that we’ve seen across the board time and time again it’s one of those gaps it’s kind of hard to fill sometimes but as our older generations it’s not normal for them to want to give positive feedback to tell somebody they’re doing a good job. We had one company we were working with actually performing strategic planning and they’re number one at the end of the day their number one concern was they needed to recruit and retain more Millennials on their workforce. and so we’re having discussions about how do we do that and this is one of the things that we talked about is Millennials especially want to feel valued. We all want to feel valued they’re just more willing to admit it I think. But we’re talking about how they want to feel more valued as employees and they want some feedback and they want to be told they’re doing a good job and maybe it’s verbal, maybe it’s written, there’s lots of different ways that we could do that but we’re having a strategic planning session and one of the old-timers he’d been there a long time. He sat back and he crossed his arms and he said, I give them a pay check and if that’s not good enough then too bad because I’m not going to go around telling them they’re doing a good job. And I was astounded and I just thought did he really say that? Like they’re sitting there saying their number one concern is they need more Millennials and he could do something that wouldn’t cost any money he just has to open his mouth and tell them that he appreciates them and he doesn’t want to do it. So those are the kind of things in order to recruit and retain the Millennials, these are the things that they want so these are the things that we need to be used to. In order to find them, we need to go where they are. We have to have a social media presence. We have to create cultures where the people that are working for us want to recruit their friends. One of the companies that I work with they go through different incentive programs. Sometimes it’s straight out cash up to thousand, fifteen hundred dollars to recruit their friends and bring them in. Sometimes it’s iPod you know electronics. But find what works but make sure you have the culture where the people that are working for you want to bring their friends and to work with you. So if you’re willing to put these things into place you’ll be able to go out and recruit and retain those Millennials as we do that and we focus on the strengths of each of the individuals it’s just like putting together a sports team. As we have variety we get stronger. So go find those Millennials today. Thanks for watching Hero TV today I hope you can put this into practice and thanks Sydne for everything that you’ve shared. Remember to subscribe. Live on purpose, make a difference, and be the hero.