In recent years, technology has evolved at an amazing pace and the generation of young people who are currently attending college or graduate school have most likely kept up with it from a young age. Rather than learning to adapt to emerging technological advances, as the previous generation did, students who are in college currently were raised with an unprecedented amount of access to any information they need and the tools to find it. This familiarity with technology will be an asset to companies who are able to recruit and hire recent college graduates.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming clear that in far too many cases, companies are still relying too heavily on the outdated practice of physically sending recruiters to college campuses to try and draw the interest of potential hires. While this may have been the best way to pique the interest of soon to be graduates in decades past, for a generation who is almost never disconnected from the digital world, it’s going to seem antiquated.
This generation, coined “millennials”, is practically guaranteed to search for employment or internship opportunities online. If your company is serious about updating its recruitment process to suit that approach, it will be crucial that you find a way to streamline your hiring process. An engaging platform and the option to submit online applications is a good start, but you must also ensure that your website is clear, easy to navigate and contains the answers to the most common questions a potential hire would have about your company and the position for which they are applying.
It’s equally important to maintain contact and give the applicants frequent updates throughout your recruitment period to keep them engaged. Applicants who feel forgotten are going to move on to other offers, and when dealing with a generation of recruits who is accustomed to instant gratification via technology, that is going to happen faster than you might expect.
Rather than succumbing to the intimidation of restructuring your recruitment program, embrace the change by updating your website, automating some of the more clerical aspects of the recruitment process, staying in frequent contact and providing your applicants with a positive experience even if they are not selected for a particular job. By adjusting these simple factors to better fit your applicants, your company should be able to make the jump into this more technologically advanced job market and start pulling in the kind of talented recruits that you are seeking.
