Improving Employee Engagement For Millennials Via The Hiring Process

September 18, 2015

Short & Sweet Version: Millennials want to become leaders of the company they currently work for, but they think they lack leadership abilities. Use the hiring process to identify leadership qualities in millennial job candidates, and then help them understand how they can grow those abilities to eventually take on leadership roles in your compan, thus improving employee engagement before they become employees. It will keep millennials committed to your organization, happier, and more motivated, resulting in better performance and higher ROI.


Everything You Need to Know: Self-absorbed. Entitled. Resistant to leadership. Let’s face it – when it comes to millennials, there’s a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions that still exist to this day. However, whether or not we’re ready, millennials are rapidly becoming an intricate part of any organization – including yours. But whether or not you subscribe to these beliefs (read: misconceptions) about millennials, there’s one very important question you need to ask yourself: what’s the reality behind these groups of workers, and how can I get the most out of them?


millennials, employee engagement, hiring process, leadershipThe Working Facts Behind The Millennial Mindset

Before you can figure out how to get the highest performance out of your millennial workers, you have to recognize what millennials are thinking and feeling about their work life. Jibe’s blog post breaks down a study by Deloitte that consisted of almost 8,000 millennials talking about leadership, how businesses operate, and how a business might impact society. Some important findings included:



  • Over half (53%) of millennial workers aspire to become a leader for the company they currently work for.
  • Millennials don’t think they have strong leadership skills, with only 27% of men and 21% of women saying that their ability to lead is a strength of theirs.
  • 28% of millennials think they’re being underutilized and that their companies aren’t taking full advantage of their skill sets.
  • 39% of millennials think that companies find leadership to be the most important asset in an employee.

We can conclude from this that millennials have high aspirations but believe that their leadership skills need improvement, and that companies aren’t utilizing them properly – which can result to feeling hindered, bored, or even frustrated with their current employment situation.


Making the Most From Employee Engagement with Millennials

This tells us a lot about what millennials think of themselves, what they hope to achieve, and where they believe companies are failing to meet their expectations. This is a fantastic opportunity to improve employee engagement with your millennials – if you know how.


Surprisingly, your employee engagement can start as early as the hiring process, especially when it comes to hiring millennials. Let’s break this down:



  1. Millennials want to become leaders, so it’s important to use the hiring process to demonstrate their opportunity for growth. They may not think to ask this, so be sure to lay out advancement opportunities for your millennial job candidates regardless of if they bring it up or not.
  2. Using pre-hire assessments can be a strong driver to determine a millennial’s leadership abilities, but why stop there? Millennials want to become leaders, and just as important, they want to learn how they can become good leaders. Use the pre-hire assessment process to determine their leadership abilities, and then highlight some ways they job can strengthen leadership areas they may be lacking in.

Of course, it takes more than leadership to do a job, and while leading is something your candidates may aspire to do, you need to make sure they can do they job before they take command of it. Using a pre-hire test can help determine what a millennial job candidate is bringing to the table with their application. By understanding what job-essential skills a candidate can have, you can make sure they’re placed in a position that not only takes full advantage of their capabilities, but also makes them feel like they’re being utilized to a high degree.


Millennials often get a lot of terms associated with them, but the one asset they are above all else is driven: driven to lead, driven to perform, and driven to learn. Take advantage of this millennial mindset by designing a hiring experience that targets these needs, perspectives, and goals to ensure that you’re not only getting the highest level of talent from the millennial candidate pool, you’re also retaining it for a long time to come.


For more information, be sure to contact us today so you can learn how to build a hiring assessment experience that meets your company’s (and candidate’s) needs. And if you want to read about how multimedia simulations can help you achieve this goal, download our whitepaper below:


 

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