Secrets Behind Retaining Millennials
“I’m not going to hire millennials because they are just going to leave in a few years anyway, so what is the point.” If we had a dollar for everytime we heard that we would be retired on a tropical island by now. On the surface, this statement raises a valid point: why hire people that will just leave? Those darn millennials are just so indecisive!
At launchbox, we find quite a few faults with this statement.
The first is that we, as a society, are getting to a point where we are no longer going to have the option to bypass hiring millennials. According to CICSO’s Millennial Research, “75,000,000 millennials are joining or looking to join the work force” and “by 2025 about 75% of the workforce will be millennials”. What are you going to do, scour the 25% of non-millennial workforce until you find a 50 year old willing to accept a starting salary? Good luck with that. Plus millennials think differently, are innovative, and create real diversity in the workplace. How about that for changing results against your competitors?
The second flaw with the reasoning is that millennials wouldn’t leave companies so frequently if these companies would learn to attract and retain millennials. Companies can’t expect to treat millennials the same way they treated incoming employees 30 years ago and achieve the same result. In fear of sounding too obvious, the generations are vastly different!
Millennials grew up in the digital age, and they don’t know any differently than to use the technology they grew up with. Information is at their fingertips, and everything is immediate. They would rather work harder than longer, which frankly makes a lot of sense to me. If I could complete a project in 4 hours with the same level of quality as a co-worker who took 8 hours but wasn’t as efficient, why wouldn’t you.
Millennials work differently, and have different expectations from a workplace. If you and your company met more of those expectations, maybe millennials wouldn’t ‘jump around’ as often.
Is it your duty to meet the needs of your employees? You ultimately get to choose. Zappos and Google chose, and who wants to work there: most everybody. You may ask, why? Because they just get it.
As always, we’d love to know what you think.
