A Millennial’s Guide to a Compelling Job Ad

Millennials. We’re a weird bunch. Highly aspirational, perpetually unsatisfied, and constantly looking towards the future. While that may be somewhat of a self-projection, I imagine at least a few of you are nodding in agreement. Millennials are set to dominate the employee base by 2025, so either way we are here to stay. To attract these folks, companies have progressively increased their social media presence, amplified their company benefits, and have become extremely brand conscious. Let’s call this the millennial marketing shift. From a recruitment standpoint, however, one key piece has lagged behind this marketing shift. That would be the job ad.

From a millenial’s perspective, typical job ads are not only immensely boring, but lack the information we truly care about. While qualifications, job responsibilities and a cute company description may be a necessity; they don’t begin to answer the questions that matter to us. Instead, try adding these 3 elements to your job ads.

1. Tell your applicants what they will learn. While not every individual in the entire workforce wants to be developed, your most impactful hires certainly do. I’d recommend clearly demonstrating to these folks how they will improve their professional skill sets if they join your company. Millennials are not interested stagnate jobs, so prove to them from the moment they read your open position that your company is committed to their professional growth.
2. Tell your applicants about the impact they will make. Some may interpret this suggestion as detailing an applicant’s growth path in your organization. While that is undoubtedly important to millennials, the more immediate concern in my opinion revolves around the value a millennial can bring to their new company from day one. If you can demonstrate to a candidate that they will fill a key void and make an immediate impact, you will have applicants hooked from the moment they read your ad. Once you have hooked millennials with a purpose, you’ll have a leg up on your competition in convincing us to join your organization.
3. Tell your applicants about the team they are joining. According to a 2014 Harvard Business review report, nearly 80% of millennials look for people ad culture fit with employers as their number determining factor in selecting a place to work.* What that really tells me is we deeply care about company culture and the folks with whom we work. Despite this, it’s very rare for an applicant to learn a thing about the specific team they will be joining from the job ad. I’d encourage everyone to share images, anecdotes, and interesting facts about the team your millennials are joining.

Through the SmartRecruiters posting wizard, you can now include videos to capture information like this at the team level and the company level. Encourage your teams to have some fun and let their personalities shine!

Spotify, the popular music streaming service, has somewhat tackled this problem as well by including personality profiles of some of their employees on their careers page. While these aren’t necessarily attached to the job ad, they do accomplish the goal of connecting with millennials on a personal level.

At the end of the day millennials want to make an impact, want to learn and be developed and want to make long lasting friendships with their coworkers. Give these tactics a chance and let me know what you think!