9.4. CASTING A WIDER NET
As demand for millennial graduates increases in the next few years, companies must extend their reach to more candidates without necessarily visiting more campuses. That means figuring out creative virtual recruiting ploys like L'Oréal's games.
Some companies are expanding their talent searches by trolling through blogs and message boards on job-oriented and other Web sites for prime candidates. They might, for instance, read a posting about a negative experience that an intern or exemployee had while working for a competitor and reach out to the disgruntled prospect with an e-mail or text message.
FedEx Corp. recruiters read blogs where young people often express their personal passions. They're looking for a match between the individual's and the firm's interests and values. "Our recruiting slogan is 'connecting people to their passions,'" says John Leech, FedEx's director of recruitment. For example, if a blogger shows a strong environmental commitment, a recruiter might send a message pointing out that FedEx is investing in "green" vehicles. The company might also contact fans of the movie Cast Away, in which actor Tom Hanks played a FedEx manager who ends up on a deserted island after a plane crash and manages to deliver one of the surviving packages after he returns to civilization. The reasoning: if they liked the movie and its heroic portrayal of a FedEx employee, they might consider a career opportunity at the company.
"We call this passive recruiting," says Leech. "It leads to an introduction with people who aren't necessarily posting their resumes online." TheWorldWideWeb certainly offers a vast hunting ground for talent. But the impatient, multitasking millennials are elusive prey. They're curious, flitting from site to site and always discovering new blogs and social networks. That's why Leech's recruiting team includes a "candidate intelligence adviser," who studies how the millennial generation works, lives, and communicates. "We need to be as creative and innovative as this new generation, if not more so," Leech says.
FedEx also tried an online career fair for information technology jobs that allowed people to send text messages directly to hiring managers. "The job candidates loved it; the hiring managers hated it," Leech says. "The managers didn't like shorthand messages like TTYL (translation: talk to you later), and they didn't like not hearing the other person's voice, because they couldn't tell if they could communicate well." For future online career fairs, the company plans to spend more time preparing managers and selecting ones who are more savvy about texting.
"Baby-boomer generation recruiters still love to set up a booth with our purple tablecloths, hand out free pens, and shake hands," Leech says. "But that isn't what millennials want. They like to hear from us online. And if they're concerned about the environment, they appreciate that we're not using all that airline fuel to fly to their campus."
Online resume banks provide another way to cast a wider net and connect more effectively with millennials. That has been part ofWhirlpool Corp.'s digital recruiting strategy. The appliance maker continues to do on-campus recruiting at its "executive campuses"—Harvard University, Indiana University, University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Michigan, and University of Chicago. But the company also seeks talent from a large group of other schools, such as Duke University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of Texas, University of Southern California, University of North Carolina, and Clark Atlanta University, through campus recruiting events and by reviewing resumes online. The company conducts telephone screenings of the most promising students it finds in an online resume database, and if it likes what it hears, it brings them into its global headquarters for further assessment.
Whirlpool also has been testing a technology that allows students to answer a set of questions via a remote PC-based video camera. That approach extends the company's reach to more students without even requiring a recruiter to do the phone screen. The recorded interviews are stored on a secure Web site that only a Whirlpool recruiter can access.
"I believe recruiting will become more and more virtual," says Tiffany Voglewede, a university recruiter and program manager at Whirlpool. "We cannot afford to recruit only from our executive campuses because other schools, including some smaller schools, have amazing students."
Greg Ruf, CEO of MBA Focus, which promotes its online resume database to companies for virtual recruiting, believes that employers must change their way of thinking to reach the millennials. "To be successful in the future, recruiters will need a different skill set," he says. "Rather than being event planners who are transaction oriented, they'll need to become more adept and comfortable with technology and the online world."
He tries to persuade companies to search resumes online for top prospects and then reach out to them with a personalized electronic message that might include a link to the corporate careers Web site. "Millennial generation students want to be contacted virtually," he says. "The students and their schools are totally stressed out by all the recruiters who are spending so much time on campus."
But it's important that online recruiting be personal and engaging. Given the deluge of information they receive daily, students will likely consider it spam if a recruiter's e-mail is nothing more than a generic corporate pitch. They want personalized messages and prefer communicating through instant messaging and texting rather than e-mail because they want immediate feedback.
Whirlpool, for example, introduced a new marketing tool to send text messages to students to inform them of recruiting events, resume submission deadlines, and interview opportunities. The company also is launching a live chat feature on its online careers site, assigning employees from different departments to answer questions at designated times. "Today's college graduates want someone right there when they have a question," says Voglewede. "Many college students have expressed their preference to communicate interactively with someone rather than just read someone's observations about the company in a blog, so we're pursuing the chat route."