Attracting Youth Top Talent to Your Team

Tactics & Trends from TalentEgg

When it comes to hiring students and new grads to join your team, half the battle can be simply reaching the right people and getting them to apply.

Perhaps you’re finding that your applicants aren’t the high calibre candidates you’re looking for, or maybe you’re struggling to draw in any applications at all. It’s a challenge we hear of all too often at TalentEgg. You have a great opportunity; why aren’t candidates applying?

The good news is, we always have an ear to the ground when it comes to what today’s young professionals are looking for, so we’re able to provide solutions that aid both students and grads on the job hunt as well as employers who are looking to attract top talent to their teams.

How to Attract and Retain Top Talent Within Your Organization

To start building up your workforce with youth talent, businesses must consider the following recommendations:

Get Social

If you’re hiring students and new grads, it’s no secret that you have to be present online. Our most recent survey revealed that 54% of students polled believed that it is highly important for employers to have a strong social media presence and online visibility. However, we must be mindful that when it comes to this demographic, how you execute your social strategy is key.

54% of students polled believed that it is highly important for employers to have a strong social media presence and online visibility.

From what we’ve heard from our Gen-Y and Gen-Z audience, we know that they’re craving authentic, quality content from employers online. Oftentimes, a potential applicant will take to social media or online search to research your company and get a feel for your culture, so it’s important to effectively represent yourself in the digital sphere.

The challenge is that being constantly served media messaging from all angles, all the time, has made today’s young people incredibly savvy when it comes to spotting authentic digital content.

So, what kind of content should you be posting?

We recommend engaging imagery like high quality photos, graphics, and video. You can even consider having your employees host Q&A sessions about their positions, or post behind-the-scenes photos of your special projects. Today’s young professionals are looking for content that feels like it’s tailored towards them and answers their questions about your organization before they have to ask.

We at TalentEgg use our social media profiles to share jobs and events on behalf of our clients to our robust online network of young professionals and partnering organizations. We know that our users come to us for help building their careers, so we share content that helps them navigate their job search. We also create short-form video content for our clients that help them tell stories about their cool workplaces, innovative internship programs, inclusive culture, social impact, and more. Youth top talent wants to hear your brand story, you just have to present it in the right way!

Provide Insider Access

When it comes to inspiring top candidates to hit that “apply now” button, there’s often nothing more effective than a success story or some insider insight from a current employee. We recently had a panel of young professionals evaluate applications for our annual awards ceremony, and we were amazed to find that the one thing employers were consistently praised for was simply providing employee testimonials.

You can certainly use social media to feature your top employees or provide access to behind-the-scenes projects (Snapchat and Instagram stories work great for this), but you can also craft more careful and thorough stories in a blog post. As an example, on our blog, The TalentEgg Incubator, we interview recent hires and new grad employees at our clients’ companies and craft engaging editorials to provide an inside look at what it’s like for a young person to experience their work culture, growth opportunities, and training.  We tell the employer’s story in an authentic, peer-to-peer style, using language and formats that are popular with young people.

We also offer our clients a live chat service that we call TalentEgg Office Hours. Office Hours is an hour-long career Q&A moderated and executed by our marketing team. Students and grads submit questions into our moderation feed, and real employers answer them. Our users love it because it allows them to interact in real-time with a recruiter and ask them questions about their company – which is something they don’t often have the chance to do.

The key is to recognize today’s young job seekers’ thirst for information AND finding a way to highlight the best things about your company, using a medium you’re comfortable with.

Highlight Career Development and Growth Opportunities

In a recent poll of our user community, 40% of respondents reported that the opportunity for career development is the most influential factor when considering a potential employer. Today’s young people are really looking for opportunities to continually learn and be involved in as many projects as possible because they know this broader experience will help them in the long run. Millennials are often given a bad rap for being “lazy” and “entitled”, but the latter portion of this generation – as well as the upcoming Generation Z – are truly committed to building meaningful careers, and they recognize that it takes effort and time. From what we can tell, this mindset is making “job hopping” a less common practice.

40%of our recent survey respondents said that the opportunity for career growth and development is the most important factor to them when considering a potential employer.

I know what you’re thinking: “how can you get all of this information across in a single job posting?” The truth is, you don’t have to – but it’s important to ensure the information is easy to find and access is made as simple as possible. On TalentEgg, our clients each have a customized employer micro-site with pages that tell the their company’s story, employer value proposition and potential career paths for young employees, and share examples of projects that new hires can get involved in. By providing a one-stop-shop for applicants with all of this information provided in the same easy to navigate place, candidates are more likely to apply right away, rather than navigating away from your job posting and your company altogether.

Wherever you’re posting your opportunities, make sure access to content highlighting your employer value proposition is close by!

Transparency is Key

When engaging students or newly graduated candidates, it’s all about being real. Share authentic content on your social media pages, provide sneak peeks of what it’s really like to work for you, and highlight real and meaningful work experiences that allow your new hires to feel like they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves. And remember, you’re not alone! We at TalentEgg are happy to help you get cracking with any new recruitment initiatives you’re looking to implement, or sit down with you to chat about what we know works.

Learn More About Hiring and Training Top Talent

Every month, Mentor Works hosts government funding webinars focused on hiring and training for workforce development. Employers can learn how to address skill gaps within their organization by leveraging grants and loans to offset employee salaries and third-party training costs.

Sign up to attend an upcoming Workforce Hiring and Training Grants webinar.

Author Profile: TalentEgg is Canada’s most popular job board and online career resource for students and recent graduates.  With our audience of 250,000 Millennial and Gen Z users each month and our innovation employer branding services, TalentEgg helps Canada’s top employers to engage and recruit Canada’s best young talent.  Check out TalentEgg’s award winning site at www.talentegg.ca.