Millennials are soon going to make up a large percentage of the global workforce, about 50% by the year 2020 according to a report by PWC. Employers today must face facts: soon, they will be interviewing, hiring, and yes, even promoting Millennials in the workforce. However, before they can even reach that stage, they must first learn how to attract and recruit Millennials.
While understanding Millennials as customers is easy, trying to grasp what it means to emloy them may be a little more complicated. After all, Millennials have different motivations from previous generations. Plus, with the advent of the Internet, many younger Millennials don’t even remember what it’s like not to be connected to the World Wide Web. That said, social media is one of the best places to recruit Millenials. This generation, after all, lives, breathes, and consumes content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (IG), G+, and even LinkedIn. If you want to recruit them, then you’ll have to be where they hang out.
To recruit Millennials, however, is not as easy as sending out tweets or posting photos on IG. In fact, using social media to reach out to these tech-savvy indviduals can easily blow up in your face, if done incorrectly. However, we’ve come up with 4 ways you can use social media to recruit Millennials for your insurance agency.
1. Build Your Brand on Social Media
Now, this may seem strange – you usually build your brand to get more customers, not employees, right? However, it’s not quite the same thing – what “build your brand” really means in this case is showing off your company culture.
These days, Millennials want more that just working 9 to 5 and cashing their paycheck. They want to work in a fun, and cool environment. Employer branding is key here and how you portray your company on social media can determine how many job applications you get.
How can you do this? Try injecting some (genuine) fun and edginess in your social media accounts. Show off your new office, or post your latest company outing at a craft beer place or weekend camping trip in the mountains. In other words, use social media to show potential recruits that you’re a place where they can look forward to working everyday.
2. Use Social Media to Listen to Their Digital Conversations
The great thing about social media is how public it can be. Previously (or IRL – in real life, as they say) , if you want to get to know your potential recruits, you’d probably have to rely on their resumes and through interviews, since you can’t really follow them around, listening to what they say and look at what they do. Today, however, you can listen to what they say and even what they do, what they listen to and watch, where they’re going, and even what they’re buying. Millennials love sharing and conversing on social media, and you can use this to your advantage.
Say for example, you’re looking for a new office manager. You could go to job sites and post an opening, but you can also go on Twitter or Facebook and look for people who are interested in working as an office manager or have previous work experience in this capacity. Maybe they list this as their past job, or perhaps even have talked to their friends online about how unhappy they are at their current job and try to recruit them through social media. You can even use social media to create a profile of your ideal Millennial recruit and use this information to find the best candidates for the job.
3. Use Images and Videos to Attract Millennial Talent
It’s no secret that social media sites like Facebook like original content, but they especially love visual content like images and more recently, videos. In fact, many suspect that video may be the only way you can get your content and your page promoted on Facebook, and the social media giant has really been pushing its live video feature a lot.
So, use videos and images to your advantage. Post photos from your office or your last company picnic. Do live videos of events and office activities. Not only will these videos help build your brand as an employer, but it can help ensure that your posts are being viewed by as many people as possible.
4. Ask Current Employees to Participate
Your current employees are perhaps your best brand ambassadors, so encourage them to post (appropriate and compliant) content from their own accounts. You can ask them to mention your Twitter handle when they tweet out to their friends or tag your page when they upload photos from the office or from your next event. Encourage them to “share” quality, compliant “fun facts” from your company page with their personal network. That’s how potentially content can go “viral.” Friends and family want to help share your “non-product” specific content to their network as long as they see value.
Encouraging your current employees to participate in social media conversations not only makes them feel more like they’re part of the company, but also allows you to leverage their presence on the Internet. Millennials will see your employees as trusted peers, and they will see your efforts to boost your employer brand as genuine, rather than manufactured to appeal to them. And this is what Millennials really want – a real, geniune experience that doesn’t pander to their generation.
Many people like to hate on the Millenial generation, but the fact of the matter is, no other generation has been more educated, driven, flexible, tech-savvy, and more in tune with the world around them. Millenials see what matters in the world and have a genuine desire to change things and help others. And that’s one thing that insurance agents need in their employees – people who truly care about clients. Millennials are an asset to any business, and any insurance agency should be proud to have them on board.
