Millennials, Gen Y, professionals born after 1981, how do we attract thee? According to the US Census Bureau, 56 Million Millennials were in the workforce either currently employed or seeking employment, surpassing the 41 Million Baby Boomers. According to Forbes, by the year 2025, Millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce. That being said, do you think it is time to take action on your Millennial sourcing strategy?
The first that you need to do is understand the millennial mind. Millennials are far from traditional. Where do Millennials hangout? Social Sites of course. I will go through a few places that we can find these Millennial talents.
Angelist
Angelist a website that is a designed for startups but it does have candidates. You can browse candidates free of charge. Millennials have a different mindset, more fearless that is. They look at startups because of innovation and creativity.
Amazon Book Reviews
How about that for an unconventional way to source? Take a look at a topic of relevance to your search and see who has commented on that book. Maybe this person will be the perfect SME for the role you are sourcing. Let us say we are looking for Mechanical Engineer; we would type Mechanical Engineer in the Amazon search box and search books.
An example can be seen below:
After we get to the search results for the book, as seen below, we can see the reviews and the name of the person that wrote the review. We can click on that person’s name to see if they have any profile details, if not, pop their name into Google and see what you find. The gentleman that posted the review below comes up as being a professor at Michigan State. Maybe just maybe, networking with him will lead to the mechanical engineer we are seeking.
Snapchat
Yep, that’s right, get to snapping. If you don’t use Snapchat, now would be the time to start. Create a profile, make it public and start snapping about things most relevant to your target audience. I myself get on Snapchat several times a day to see what the latest and greatest is.
Facebook groups have become a popular destination for millennials to “hang out” and connect with like-minded individuals.
With 330 million users as of June 2018, it is a popular destination for millennials. Reddit, with 36 million user accounts, is among them. Millenials tend to post their comments on particular matters on Reddit. The amount of engagement regarding response to these posts are incredible. This resource that can be utilized to learn about users that are interested in a particular topic. There are also 853,824 subreddits. These are web forums of a specific topic within Reddit where you can post links and discuss. You can subscribe if you like that topic or you can unsubscribe if you don’t. An example is below, let’s say I am looking for people that are “materials engineers”:
You can see there are three communities above that come up that you can subscribe to with relevancy.
Above you can see the first topic that comes up for the search, and it talks about majors in materials engineering. With 70 comments, I think there may be a few people for me to speak to here.
You need to be active on Instagram, but you have to maintain that activity to grow your following. If you can keep your posts updated, as millennials do, you will gain a following, and hopefully, they will retweet your posts. In this case, you have reached a new audience.
Glassdoor
We can do several things as sourcers on Glassdoor. Get your company to get on “best places to work list.” A study was conducted by Glassdoor that shows that 65 percent of Glassdoor users agree their perception of a company improves after seeing companies on best places to work list with employee reviews. See if you can get approval to start a campaign to encourage employee reviews of the company, benefits, and management. Below is an example of SAP’s Glassdoor information, as Glassdoor as a company that heavily utilizes it to boost company profile and acknowledge employees reviewed it. There are 8,300 reviews, and overall the company is rated 4.4. I would say that Millennials would be very interested in entertaining this company.
Overall, Millennials live in a technological world where social media influences everything. The next time you are in search of Millennial talent, keep this in mind. Now that I have shared a few places with you, I would love to hear about where you search for Millennials.