How to Ensure Your Hiring Process Isn’t Turning Away Millennial Job-Seekers

By Danielle Wirsansky on April 10, 2020

The Millennial generation is hard at work. At this point in their lives, those of this generation have or are beginning to start families and are generally well out of college. According to Mental Floss, Millennials are defined as such: “Born 1981-1996 (22-37 years old).” They need to be earning money and the way that they do that? By holding down a job.

They are an excellent potential employee market to tap, but there are certain things a recruiter can do that could turn off Millennials from applying for or accepting a position offered by you. Read on to ensure that your hiring process is not turning away millennial job-seekers!

twitter.com

Read a Resume

One of the biggest complaints job applicants make about the hiring process is a particular aspect that many online job applications have: the fact that job applicants have to basically re-type their resume into specific fields instead of being able to just have a recruiter read their resume directly. It is tedious, seemingly pointless, and can take many extra hours of work.

Many applicants do not understand why so many employers make them re-fill out all this information and how it is actually in their benefit. The Jobs Can Blog explains why employers do this very succinctly: “Some applicant tracking systems (ATS) automatically parse your uploaded resume into a digital candidate profile that can be searched or filtered by recruiters…. When a company configures their ATS to receive your resume then ask for all that same information via text input fields, they’re avoiding some of the problems associated with resume parsing. The resume you uploaded will be used if a recruiter wants to give it a once-over or print it out. The information you manually input into the system will be used for searches and other ranking algorithms.”

While using keywords and doing searches through employee applications might make your life easier, it certainly does not make your potential employees’ lives any easier. And there are lots of other jobs that they can apply to that take less effort and work.

Additionally, many truly qualified candidates could fall through the cracks if you only rely on ATS searches. It might be a little bit more work, but you will definitely stop deterring Millennials from applying for your open positions and letting good applicants accidentally fall between the cracks if you take the time to stop, read the resume instead of having applicants fill out the information again, and smell the roses.

Have Realistic Expectations

The next thing you can do as a recruiter is to set realistic expectations for the job candidates you are hoping to receive. Of course, you want the best applicants as possible. The usual line of thinking usually is that the more qualified a person, the better a job they will do. However, there are a lot of other qualities an employee can have or not have that absolutely must be taken into consideration when reviewing job applicants. A person’s personality, their problem-solving skills, their leadership skills and style, and much more must all be taken into account because they all affect how a person will do their job, sometimes much more than their experience and education.

These things, education, and experience are still very important. But there is also such a thing as having applicants who are overqualified. Do you really need an applicant with a master’s degree for this position? Do they really need 8-10 years of experience? Are all the elements listed as required for an applicant really required, or is it just preferred?

Deloitte Insights shares that Millennials are currently the most highly educated of the generations. The only issue with that is “…although educational attainment is growing, the number of jobs that require higher education is not growing as rapidly.” They also revealed in their study that almost half of those who went and attained a college degree worked in positions that did not even require a degree.

Keep your requirements simple. Aim high with your applicants, but not for the sky.

Include Salary

One of the most annoying things a recruiter can do is to not include salary information in their job ads. Why waste the applicants time and your own by going through an entire interview process only for your salary range to be far too low for the applicant to have ever considered?

Of course, you do not want to discourage applicants from coming forward, but if you are afraid of frightening away good prospects because of the salary you are offering, you might want to think further on this and perhaps reconsider the wages you are offering.

Millennials are not interested in wasting their time or your own and are much more likely to skip over a job application that does not include salary information so do the right thing and just list it already.

Photo by energepic.com from Pexels

Millennials are not such different creatures from those of other generations. However, you definitely want to know the little quirks that might help you gain more traction with this employee demographic. Utilize these strategies and if all goes smoothly, you should see an increase in qualified applicants.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Get College Recruiting News Monthly

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format