In order to seduce top talent, employers must be at their best behaviour
Employers must present themselves better than ever before to win top talent.
Despite downturns in the oil sector, Norway is a low-unemployment country, and many well-educated young job seekers live well. They are often employed 1 and 2 years before they finish their degree at university or college.
This means that there are high demands on employers seeking top candidates. Therefore, the smartest employers allocate significant resources to enhance their image with potential job seekers — so-called employer branding.
This task was previously almost exclusively reserved for HR, while a coordinated interaction between the marketing department, management, and HR is required today to solve the tasks.
In this article, we look at what young workers and jobseekers, in particular, look for in potential employers. As we will see, it’s far more than money and career opportunities.
Many of today’s youths demand a sense of purpose in their jobs, but what does it mean to them?
A generation on their own
The Millennial Generation, those born between 1980–2000, has grown up in a digital world. They are characterised by being social, curious, honest, and they love to share personal information like pictures, videos, music and much more with friends and family. They are therefore an incredibly important market factor for brands because they rank, comment and share positive and negative experiences with their world at a surprisingly rapid pace.
In other words, do not make yourself an enemy with members of this generation.
Honesty goes a long way
This joy of sharing just about everything with the whole world also has consequences for you as an employer. A successful image as an attractive employer is more short-lived today than a few years ago. Authenticity is a key word in today’s labour market. Those employers who can tell, in a credible way, who they are, what they stand for and how the job they do, also contributes to the outside world, have an advantage. These are the employers that will win an audience with today’s youth.
And as we know, the future belongs to the young. This means that it is not necessarily a clever idea to invite graduates to big parties with fancy dinners and vintage champagne.
Remember that most students are ordinary people in the same way that most people in your company are. Those who may be charmed by big spending may not be the ones you ought to hire.
In addition, this type of marketing often has very little originality. Chances are that your competitors are doing the same thing. Therefore, you should dig deeper and get to the bottom of what really matters to your business — and for those who will work for you.
Read on and discover some of the benefits from realising why you are in business and what tasks matter. This is what we like to call “purpose.”
- Do you honestly know what the purpose of your company is?
- Find out why you should define a meaningful purpose.
- How to win the best candidates through our five tips.
The struggle for top talent
The battle for the best talent has never been as tough as today. Employers use large resources to tactically position themselves to attract the new wave of graduates and those who already have a few years of experience. It is all a new agenda for companies wishing to secure the most qualified.
To profile themselves as attractive employers is alpha and omega for those companies that are experiencing particularly tough competition for top candidates. This task was previously almost exclusively reserved for HR, while a coordinated interaction between the marketing department, management, and HR is required today to solve the tasks at hand.
Changes are taking place all the time. For example, students in IT, economics, and technology experience are being snapped up one or two years before graduation by companies looking to pick top shelf talent. An employer’s chance game you might add, but securing the right skills have become a matter of survival for businesses.
Why engagement is key
Unfortunately, many managers do not know what motivates people. They believe most people are looking for 1) better pay, 2) secure jobs, and 3) opportunities for career advancement. The author and businessman Dan Pink, known for his TED presentations, claims that the most important motivational factors are 1) independence, 2) mastering your job, and 3) purpose.
With “purpose” we understand that what we do must mean something to us. Having a purpose is therefore about going to work every day, or starting a business without making money being the primary drive ingredient. It is about an intrinsic desire to see positive changes in society around you. Such a purpose nourishes your inner motivation and it inspires others so that they will follow in your footsteps.
Include sustainability in your business strategy
As a society there is a consensus about the severity of the environmental impact we inflict on the planet. This colours the debate in many arenas, at both the macro and micro levels. For brands, this means that having a sustainable purpose becomes all the more important. So if you already have a purpose, it may well be time to brush dust off of the paper it is written on and check if is necessary to update it.
If you haven’t got a purpose statement at all or if you’re an entrepreneur starting out for the first time, it is time to do some proper research of your planned target audience — and get started. We cover this subject extensively in our book “Point of purpose”.
“What people want most at work is a sense of purpose.”
— Nikos Mourkogiannis
The Millennial generation stands out in a particular way. Today’s youths have grown up in a digital age where sharing one’s heart is the most natural thing. The Millennial generation is far from a superficial bunch of youngsters as claimed by some ill-tongued. On the contrary, they are deeply engaged in the world, they are global citizens because they have been exposed to impressions from all over the world through traditional media and social media since they were children.
We also see that the Millennium generation is concerned with what companies most deeply stand for. It is not enough that the company has a facade that looks nice, the inside must be equally impressive. It is this “content” that makes young, well-educated job seekers want to work for the most attractive employers.
Work-life balance
In a Nordic perspective, Universum’s ranking of the most popular employers show that a work-life balance scores high, as well as having a safe job. Furthermore, the results show that it’s very important with continuous learning — and people want their jobs to matter beyond the workplace. The latter goes hand in hand with having a purpose.
Born into insecurity
Today’s students have grown up in the aftermaths of the economic boom of the 80s, the 90s, and the 2000s. The benefits their parents took for granted, such as property, safety and pensions, are not readily available, and this makes them by necessity more mobile. And because they have grown up “online”, they have a simple relationship with new technology: use what benefits them, throw out the rest.
We can say that disruption has become second nature. They are relaxed with uncertainty and they are looking for employers who can enrich their lives for a purpose beyond making money.
Identifying with the job
Many young people today want to work for an employer they can identify with. They want to work for a business or organisation that represents a purpose that they themselves strive for and want to be a part of. Young people have always been idealistic, yet, the Millennium generation still seeks more out of work than just income. For them, the job is something they identify with, and it may be just as well be that most of us spend about 8 hours at work every day.
According to Deloitte’s Millennial Survey, 6 out of 10 said that purpose is something they are looking for in potential employers. Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte Global, expresses this as follows:
It is clear when Millennials are considering their career goals, they are equally interested in how companies contribute to the development of people and society as in products and profits. These findings should be a wakeup call for businesses.
Brands that manage to position themselves strategically beyond their own duck ponds, are popular with job seekers. According to Unilever, the world’s third most popular employer on LinkedIn, they can allocate half of job applications from graduates to the company’s focus and commitment to ethical and sustainable product development. Furthermore, more than 76% of Unilever employees say they know that their jobs contribute to the company’s agenda.
At Mission, we explain to our clients that they need to take specific steps to make their companies more enticing for the new workforce.
Here are five tips for companies who want to find the best talent:
5 tips for finding great talent
- Make sure there is a correlation between theory and practice. Having a stylish website, showing off impressive-sounding values such as “inclusive”, “responsible” and “courageous” hardly works if this is not reflected in the work culture or customers’ experience of the brand.
- Invest in your employees. Your main target audience should be your employees, followed by customers, investors and owners. When did you last check the well-being and motivation of your employees? Are you working to bridge the gaps between different departments and work cultures. And how is the management team getting on with the other employees?
- Invest in learning. “Knowledge equals power” rings truer today more than ever before, and knowledge has a short-lived shelf life. This is especially true for technology. If you want to stay in the lead, you must facilitate continuous learning at the workplace. This can be in the form of courses, further education during working hours or to ensure that employees with experience may transfer this to new employees.
- Hire great leaders. Little is more demotivating than leaders not equipped to lead. There are many leadership styles naturally, but a common denominator is to lay out an agenda, set clear goals and chart a course for all staff. When the manager output is unfocused, employee input gets diffuse at best. It will not take long before the best in the class start looking for new challenges.
- Why are you here? As a business owner or CEO you should ask yourself why it is that you do what you do. What are the most important sets of tasks you seek to solve? In short; what is the purpose of the business? A meaningful purpose gives the business direction, it distinguishes your offerings and sets you apart. This is motivating not only for today’s employees, but also for those you are trying to win.
To hire great talent, you must show them they’ll have a meaningful job at your company. For today’s workforce, this means you must clearly communicate your company’s purpose.
Investing in a great website design, the growth of your current employees and leadership, and regularly checking in to see that your company is staying true to its purpose will help bring in great talent.
This article was written by Ole Abildsnes, and was first published on Mission’s website. Find out what other fascinating issues we write about.
