Over the past year, we’ve waffled on about tweaking your recruitment marketing to suit Millennials, but what about the younger generation?
Aged between 7 and 22 in 2019, Gen Zers are the new crop of digital-savvy professionals hungry to succeed.
Unlike any other prior generation, they’ve only ever known a world filled with mobile phones, laptops, touch technology and various other gizmos.
So, it’s hardly surprising to learn that they’re notorious for approaching everything from a consumer basis.
In other words, Gen Zers live and breathe products, services and brands.
In fact, research reveals that they’re 33% more likely to chat about these things on a daily basis than people over the age of 21.
With this in mind, where do you even start when adapting your recruitment process to attract these digital-age kids?
Up your recruitment marketing game
The key to reaching a consumer-centric generation is by using a similar marketing strategy as a retailer would to its own target audience.
Recruitment marketing is all about giving the talent market lots of choices.
Your business needs to engage and build a strong emotional connection very quickly, otherwise, they’ll be scrolling or moving onto the next topic of interest.
The final key element to a successful recruitment marketing strategy for Gen Z is trust.
This group of professionals are presented with various options, so you must establish a certain level of trust for them to invest their time in applying for your vacancies.
Recruitment marketing is also a handy way of building higher quantities of qualified candidates in the talent pipeline too.
With the right strategy in place, you’ll be able to improve hiring metrics like speed to hire and new hire retention, which can save you time and money in the long-run.
How to implement a modern recruitment marketing strategy
Make it personal
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is all about showing Gen Zers what it’s like to work for your company.
With this group of candidates being so reliant on social media and digital technology, you need to really ramp up your personalised outreach campaigns to ensure that your advert or post speaks to them.
Every communication should answer questions like:
- Why would a Gen Z candidate choose you?
- What does your employment experience provide that Gen Z candidates want?
To help you successfully improve your EVP, try focusing on the areas which appeal to Gen Zers the most. According to Monster:
- 74% of Gen Z candidates strongly believes work should have a greater purpose.
- 84% of Gen Z identify career progression and growth potential as their main priority when looking for a new job.
- 8 in 10 Gen Z job seekers would like employers. Businesses help them develop job-specific and soft skills.
- 70% of Gen Z say they are heavily motivated by money.
Using this information, you need to touch upon these areas in your digital recruitment marketing campaigns and really make it personal to what Gen Zers want.
Create an experience
The recruitment process shouldn’t stop when a Gen Zer hits “Apply”.
In today’s candidate-driven market, your business is getting analysed just as much as you are analysing them.
Getting the candidate experience right all starts with the way you communicate with them right through to the post-interview stages.
Did you bother to send unsuccessful applicants a personalised letter explaining your decision so that they can improve and learn?
Did you ask the right sort of questions in the interview?
Were you positive about potential growth and training opportunities?
Every last detail matters.
A good way to improve the candidate experience for Gen Zers is to showcase the high tech side of your business and the training opportunities available.
These are the kinds of areas that’ll make Gen Z candidates’ ears prick up.
Choose the right kind of communication
The digital-savvy nature of Gen Zers interacts very differently to Millennials or Baby Boomers.
For instance, they prefer video over text content when they’re looking for things online.
They’d also much prefer to be contacted via text rather than over the phone.
And believe it or not, Facebook is deemed a thing of the past to this generation. Instead, they prefer using social platforms like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram.
From a recruitment marketing point of view, you can share your EVP message with Gen Z more easily by creating job adverts in video format and texting them details about the interview.
However, it’s important that your business doesn’t discard the messaging and communication side of things too.
Gen Z candidates need to feel like you care about them and are personalising the experience for them as well.
If you can successfully weave these two elements together, you’ll be onto a winner.
Summary
At the end of the day, appealing to Gen Zers is a simple matter of putting your consumer hat on.
Ask yourself, how do you like brands to reach out for you when shopping?
What kind of social media posts made you stop scrolling and pay attention?
As a shopper, you probably won’t have any problems ‘shopping around’ for the best deal, so you’d be naïve to think that a Gen Z candidate won’t take the same approach when it comes to their careers.
It’s about making your business stand out from your competitors.
Adopt the same digital marketing philosophy you use to attract prospects and you’ll probably start appealing to more Gen Zers.
And if you don’t, it might be an indication that you need to rethink your next digital strategy in both marketing and recruitment.
Enjoyed reading this? Then you might find some of our previous posts useful:
- ’10 Things You Need to Know About Hiring Millennials’
- ‘5 CV Trends You Might Encounter With Millennials’
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