Recruiting young talent no easy feat for employers

Employers have to hunt down the best and brightest college graduates to nourish their ranks, and those that don’t will starve as their competitors grow stronger.

Ian Ybarra firmly believes this to be a business truism, and he recently coached Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce members how to connect with a new breed of young adults who put a high priority on keeping their career options open.

Ybarra is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who co-wrote “Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent.” Co-authors are Ramit Sethi and lead author Chris Resto, founding director of the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s largest professional development and internship program. The book’s recruiting tips are based on information gleaned from interviews with more than 1,000 college students.

Through their research, the authors have built a dossier on prototypical, high-achieving millennials – as they’re known – being churned out by the country’s most competitive colleges and universities.

Members of this generation, typically under 30 years of age, want to advance their careers and expand future opportunities through internships and early jobs, Ybarra said, noting that their sense of idealism runs contrary to long-term careers with one company or within a single industry. To that end, Ybarra said employers are finding it harder to recruit and retain these restless newcomers.

To compound the problem, Ybarra noted that most employers are looking for the same outstanding employee: a self-starter with energy, integrity and creativity who’s also tech-savvy and equipped with superb communication skills.

“You’re all competing against everyone,” he told attendees of an Aug. 19 event. “This is what creates the war for talent.”

Tips for survival

Companies that want to reel in the best recruits must adhere to five maxims spelled out in the book, Ybarra said. They are:

• Adopt a talent mindset.

• Know your customer.

• Sell your people first and your company second.

• Build a robust recruiting machine.

• Present a united front.

Ybarra said more employers should mimic the attitudes of college athletics recruiters, who extensively scout talent and then tirelessly pursue the best prospects. “Go find the ones you want,” he told chamber members.

The “Recruit or Die” authors also encourage recruiters to sell their people first and then the company. Ybarra said companies should spread the recruiting burden throughout their ranks, rather than relying primarily on human resources staff. Potential recruits want to meet their potential co-workers, he suggested.

“In the end, the recruits are going to ask, ‘Could I work with these people?’” he said.

Successful recruiters also know their customers and tailor their sales pitch accordingly.

Career, glamour and gossip are three points to remember when recruiting young talent, Ybarra said. With the next best career option always lurking around the corner, employers must up the ante with rotation programs and career coaching to keep interns and entry-level employees engaged and stimulated.

On the glamour front, companies have to make themselves attractive to a generation that’s always looking for the next best thing. Money and perks are a given, but offering competitive recruitment programs, providing access to senior executives and paying individual attention to top recruits also can be effective retention tools, Ybarra said.

Gossip is the press a company receives from new hires – and to a greater extent, applicants who are passed over. In the age of online social networking, employers should use diplomacy and class when rejecting job candidates, Ybarra warned.

“The result is everything you do – good or bad – is amplified,” he said. “Everybody all over campus will know about it. … The people who define your (company’s) reputation are the ones you don’t hire. Each one becomes a foot soldier, (a) word-of-mouth marketing machine.”

Re-evaluating recruitment

Michael Sapp, president of Springfield-based Sapp Design Associates Architects, said he’s rethinking his firm’s approach to recruitment after attending the “Recruit or Die” seminar.

“Recruiting today is more difficult than it’s ever been,” he said. “And if companies don’t invest the proper time and effort, they’re going to lose out. The days of just assuming you’re a great company and that people are going to walk through the door are not there anymore.”

Sapp said Ybarra’s advice -about selling people first, avoiding the perils of the online gossip chain and re-evaluating the effectiveness of career fairs were particularly useful. SDA has routinely appeared at career fairs in the four-state area, but Sapp said a different recruiting strategy might be in order.

“They are expensive; they’re very time-consuming,” Sapp said. “… There is such a demand for talent across the country that the large signature architectural-engineering firms are coming to areas that we haven’t seen in the past. That seems to kind of make us the stepchild.”

Fortunately, Drury University’s architecture school has provided SDA with a steady stream of talented young architects interested in staying in Springfield, Sapp said. But attracting their peers from other parts of the country has been a challenge, he added.

“The thing that we always find is people questioning the value of coming to Springfield, Missouri, when you have all these other firms … from large metropolitan areas,” Sapp said. “That really catches the attention of young folks.”

New Springfield City Manager Greg Burris, who also attended the seminar, said that creating jobs to keep talented college grads in Springfield would be one of his priorities.

“One of my areas of emphasis is going to be how we can use economic development to slow the brain drain,” he said. “We’re generating human capital and a lot of new graduates would like to stay in Springfield if they could find the right kind of good-paying jobs.”

Burris also said the suggested practice of selling people first is something he’s tried to do as an administrator at Missouri State University. Allowing job applicants to meet with departmental staff during interviews makes sense, he said, adding that “they’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing them.” [[In-content Ad]]