Recruiting Young Talents With These 5 Keys

Recruiting Young Talent With These 5 Keys

Autumn takes us back to school, back to work, and back to the big search for top notch talent. In many cases, fresh, focussed minds come in young, ambitious packages. That’s why young talent is fast becoming the most coveted talent in the job market!

Sara Dalsfelt, Adway’s Senior Advisor of Digital Talent Acquisition, sat down with Andreas Tallian, a psychologist and candidate experience researcher whose niche is in the recruitment of trainees, graduates and young talents. 

Together, they broke down the five keys to attract, hire and retain young talent. 

If you’re ready to watch the entire session, enjoy!

If you’d rather take in the biggest takeaways, keep reading.  

Background Check 

Andreas Tallian is a psychologist specialising in recruitment at Aon Assessment in Stockholm. Aon Assessment is a forward-looking company that measures candidate information to support their client’s brand and help them engage and employ the best of AI and psychometric advancements. He’s deeply interested in organisational psychology and has conducted extensive research in psychological tests for the workplace. 

5 Keys For Recruiting Young Talent

1. Have a Strong Employer Brand 

Companies with strong employer branding see 50% more qualified applicants, are one to two times faster to hire and are three times more likely to make a quality hire. How you communicate your values and business strategy to your candidates is essential in attracting the best candidates to apply for positions at your company. 

So, what is a strong employer brand? 

According to newer generations of talent who self-identify as digital natives, there are three key topics that motivateyoung talent more than anything else: 

1. Diversity 
2. Inclusion 
3. Sustainability 

Young talent will evaluate their employers based on these three priorities, so it’s crucial for employers to sell their promise as a company from the get go. Recruitment marketing materials should represent people and scenarios that reinforce and communicate the employer’s commitment to attracting diverse candidates, being inclusive and living out sustainability efforts. 

At Adway, we put an emphasis on programmatic employer branding, helping companies automate the best recruitment advertising around the above topics and pairing it with the right platforms and target groups. 

1. Increase Diversity Through Objective Assessments 

This gives companies the opportunity to communicate their employer brand strategy through action. 

How? By recruiting with objective measures like cognitive awareness assessment and personality questionnaires versus more traditional recruitment methods like cover letters and recommendations. 

Certain selection methods such as CV screening can add a layer of discrimination into the hiring process, while inviting in conscious bias and favoritism. 

By using an objective, unbiased recruitment system, you can eliminate human bias from the equation and reinforce your commitment to organisational diversity. 

Long story short: be hands off as soon as possible in the talent acquisition process.

1. Invest in the Candidate Experience

Organisations that invest in a strong candidate experience improve their quality of hires by 70%. Applicants who feel positive or satisfied with their candidate experience go on to recommend that company to others.

Relevancy is the most essential part of a great candidate experience. Recruiters should ensure candidate assessments are perceived by the candidate as relevant and valid to complete. 

Start by communicating the “why” behind using the desired screening tool (assessment, CV screening, etc.) and make that “why” clear from the beginning of the application process. Candidates appreciate the opportunity to prove what they can do, instead of just being rated on their current experience level. 

In the case of recruiting passive candidates, who make up 70% of today’s workforce,  it’s even more crucial to be relevant. Go the extra mile to createa value proposition within seconds of their initial impression for a seamless candidate experience. 

Above all else: be transparent. 

1. Keep Young Talents With Flexible Career Paths

According to the Institute of Student Employers, three years after the initial trainee program has been completed, firms lose, on average, 28% of young talent. After five years, this increases to 44%. 

The main cause of most employer’s inability to retain employees is the lack of flexible career paths within the organisation. Additionally, some employers fail to present career paths to their employees even when they exist. 

Young talents relish the idea of lateral movement within a company versus climbing a ladder. They actually look at their employer as a form of paid education.  

By creating a job neighborhood map and communicating it to young talents, you can formulate a flexible career path for them to grow into. By charting out their movement within the organisation, you’ll increase the odds of actually keeping them.

Bottom line: be proactive about building talent mobility. 

1. Be Data Driven

Picture this: you have ten different companies, each with young talents who are exceptional at their jobs. How many of these ten companies are actually using data points to improve their talent acquisition process versus simply storing the data? 

The answer: only 36% of organisations view themselves as very skilled in leveraging workforce data to make informed decisions about the future of work. 

By being able to identify the key factors that drive success for young talent, and actually quantify this measure, it’s exponentially easier to recruit new young talent based on these same parameters. 

By partnering up with a TA technology or assessment provider who can help you leverage your existing data, you can improve your hiring process and achieve your strategic talent acquisition goal to recruit more young talent. 

Keep it simple: you don’t have to be tech savvy, you just have to be tech-comfortable. 

The Top Two Takeaways 

1. Focus as a company on things that motivate young talent, especially Diversity & Inclusion (by using an unbiased recruitment process) and Sustainability. 
2. Use data to your advantage. Don’t just store data, leverage it by teaming up with a TA technology or assessment provider. Even better: ask for demos! 

Questions From the Audience 

Rebecca Bideberg, Graphic Designer & Copywriter (Freelance)

What’s considered “sustainable” when it comes to Key #1?

• Sustainability refers to an organisation who’s working toward environmentally and socially empowering initiatives like reducing emissions and improving society. It’s your value proposition toward society and people to take further responsibility far beyond the recruitment process. 

Akbar Mahjob, Project Manager/ Mechanical Engineer,Enerco Group AB 

But some jobs need experience, so how do you approach this?

• Some positions certainly do require experience, but research also shows that experience in years is not predictive of how a candidate will succeed in the role. In the event experience really is required, it’s important to include it upfront in the recruitment process, making it completely valid to measure that qualification. 

Carl Wilhelm Hagander, Chief Commercial Officer,ReSocialize

How does the theme in key 2 (that candidates appreciate a chance to show what they can do through unbiased assessment) interact with the fact that application processes with many hurdles lead to reduced candidate follow-through?

Do you see that there is a specific profile of candidates that start an application without fulfilling it?

• Applicants who tend to drop out of the candidate experience are applicants who weren’t really interested in the job to begin with. The more steps they have to go through in the process, the more insight they get into the actual role. Thus, longer assessments tend to increase the number of high-quality candidates who finish all the steps. Additionally, the assessment phase comes much further down the funnel, when candidates are more bought into the overall process. By increasing candidate engagement in the earlier steps, making the application process super smooth and mobile friendly, the most relevant candidates will be primed and ready for the assessment.