3 Ways to Entice Millennials to Your Workplace

By Amy Brown, SHRM-CP, PHR

When hiring new staff members, it’s always important to view each applicant on his or her own terms. While a generation of people might have a number of traits in common, you can’t treat the group as an homogenous entity. In other words, groups like the millennials, who according to The Wall Street Journal are part of the largest generation currently in the workforce, are not all the same.

It is generally accepted that the millennial generation encompasses those born between 1980 and 2000. However, the world was a much different place for those born at the beginning of the generation than for those born at the end. In terms of technology, that means the difference between the novelty of a Walkman cassette player and the novelty of a cell phone with a full qwerty keypad.

As you think about hiring millennials into your business, you need to keep this gap in mind. Enticing millennials to work for you is going to require more than an interesting company culture.

As a business owner or manager, you may be tasked with hiring and/or managing a diverse group of employees. When working with millennials specifically, take the highlighted three tips into consideration. Hiring and training can cost a great deal of time and money, so be sure your new hires are a good fit. An HR professional, or an HR outsourcing company, can always work with you to develop materials specifically designed to develop and retain millennial talent. You should also be actively seeking out benefits that are specific to millennials, such as a medical benefits package that appeals to those starting a family.

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1FOCUS ON CAREER DEVELOPMENT

2PROVIDE GREATER FREEDOM

3DEVELOP A STRONG SENSE OF COMMUNITY

While millennials fresh out of college may indeed jump around from job to job as they figure out what they want to do with their professional lives, older millennials are looking for ways to advance their careers. Roberta Matuson, a market leadership expert writing for Forbes magazine, noted that training programs should be more than just platforms for onboarding – they should show new hires how they will be able to advance within your company over time. Smaller businesses may have trouble with this aspect because owners or managers need to focus on getting new hires up to speed so they can contribute to the company as soon as possible.

Across the board, millennials are looking for more freedom in the workplace. CNN reported that members of the generation tend to look for autonomy and more control over the decision-making process when looking for a new job. If your job is focused in the online sphere, this could be a fairly easy policy to adopt. You don’t have to completely let go of the reins, but showing your employees that you respect their time is one sure way of creating a culture that’s enticing.

Younger millennials grew up with social networks. Interacting with their peers over the internet is commonplace, but they also understand the power of cultivating relationships face-to-face. It’s a mistake to think of millennials as only capable of networking over their smartphones. Peter Voogd, a bestselling author writing for Entrepreneur magazine, recommended cultivating a sense of community at work as a key way of attracting millennials. Showcasing your workplace as a hub of communication is good because it demonstrates that your enterprise takes the interpersonal element of business seriously.