Welcome to the age of the “hyper hopper” where employees are changing companies every few years. The days of tenure, pensions, and retiring from the company you started are more fairy-tale than reality.
Gen Z are changing jobs every 2.1 years. That’s a stunning statistic when you think of the amount of time it takes to hire, onboard, and ramp a new employee only to get a year of production out of them before they are setting sail for the next great opportunity. With the Gen Z demographic set to make up the largest portion of the workforce by 2020; you can see why companies are scrambling to reexamine the way they attract, engage, hire, and retain their talent.
Here are three ways innovative companies are tackling the hyper hopper challenge head on and succeeding:
- Reimagine your University Recruiting programs, as an, “Early in Career” program
Leading Talent Acquisition teams are finding their University Recruiting team is the most equipped to hire Gen Z. Why? They are evolving beyond seasonal college hiring to year-round engagement. Powered by data from years of recruiting on campus they are re-engaging that talent pool for early in career roles. This is a smart move for two reasons.
- They already have established a connection in the past with this person
- They are now more attractive with 2-4 years of experience vs. right out of college
For example: A Director of Talent for a 50,000 person company shared a top intern turned down their offer. With a regular cadence they kept recruiting him (along with several others) on a quarterly basis. The company’s steady yet persistent engagement paid off when he eventually approached them for a job. Best of all, he’d been working for a competitor, so he became an even more valuable hire.
2. Celebrate Tenure
I recently visited the global and European HQs of an innovative fast-growing tech company and fell in love with how they celebrate tenure. When an employee hits a key work milestone, they have a branded flag celebrating this hung above their cubicle. Surrounding Gen Z hires with tenured mentors and coworkers is a subtle and powerful message that you can succeed and stay with the right company for years to come.
3. Creatively Contact and Engage Talent
From hand-written letters to QR codes, recruiters are thinking outside of the box to make an impression on Gen Z candidates. One interesting trend is that more and more that recruiting teams are utilizing texting to engage top talent. Where texting had been utilized for executive and campus recruiting, I’m starting to hear more day-to-day recruiting teams testing this out. The data backing it up is staggering l when you see that 22% of emails are read vs. 98% of text messages.
Ultimately creativity is key when engaging with Gen Z.
In closing, the world of talent acquisition is always evolving, and I encourage you to tackle this new era of the, “hyper-hopper” head on with these tips and tricks.
And if you don’t, know your competitors are…
Please feel free to follow me and ask questions on Twitter @AndreJBoulais and connect on LinkedIn.
Relying on a decade of leading global talent teams, Andre is a strategic-thinking senior talent acquisition leader who pushes the boundaries of "what's next" in recruiting. From social media recruiting to passive candidate attraction via digital marketing web landing pages powered by Jobvite Engage, he’s devoted his entire career to creating, evolving and executing successful recruiting strategies across four continents. Andre currently works with C-Suite leadership with Fortune 500 companies to create and drive unique global talent acquisition and employer branding initiatives. Before Jobvite, he built out, hired and directly managed the global Inbound & Outbound Sourcing Teams for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud supporting roles across all division and across four continents. He’s also a public speaker at conferences and webinars on talent acquisition.
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