Millennials can be hard working, loyal, well-adjusted and fulfilled employees, but they need to be paired with the right companies and positions. If you’re interested in developing young talent in your organization, we suggested utilizing all four of the tactics below. Each offers something different and will lead to a well-adjusted and effective workforce that will help ensure the ongoing success of your company or firm.
Effective Recruiting
Developing young talent actually starts before the hire. Ensuring that you’re bringing the right type of people into your organization from the get-go helps set up everyone up for success in the long run. Start by recruiting young people who are specifically interested in your field. Vet young recruits carefully to ensure impactful and long-lasting hires. Taking time with potential recruits and making sure they understand the field they’re getting into is a good way to save time and money in the long run. It’s better to paint an accurate picture up front than for there to be any misunderstanding about what the day-to-day is like at your firm.
Further, seek to educate young people about what your company and industry can offer them. Showing Millennials clear career paths from the onset and highlighting the skills they’re able to use and develop can help ensure you’re bringing the right people into your company. For example, in many positions in the insurance industry technical, sales, account management, and/or data analytics skills are utilized on a daily basis. In law firms, young lawyers (and even paralegals) can expect, among other things, to develop skills in the realms of research, critical thinking, information analysis, and public speaking.
Proper Training
Once your new recruit is on board, it’s important to properly train them from the beginning. Training doesn’t need to be elaborate or fancy but it does need to be cost-effective, interesting and meaningful. Effective training helps get Millennials invested in the process from day one. Invest up front in presenting training in a format they respond to (digital)—in the long term this is actually more economical and helps the company be seen as a cutting edge technology user. In a digital format, employees can train at their own pace, and overall, digital training is easier to update than printed materials. Further, proper training helps Millennials feel like valued and respected members of your organization. In the end, this will help build loyalty to your company and foster higher engagement levels with the work your young team member has been hired to do.
Ongoing Mentoring
Well-developed mentoring programs help create meaningful relationships that allow young recruits to grow, and they also ensure that your company to has a valuable management development pipeline. Ongoing mentoring relationships can help your company develop and grow its own talent within the company instead of hiring expensive managers who were trained by other companies. This helps ensure that managers are invested in the company because they’ve been steeped in your values and methods since they were just starting out in their careers. Mentors can also act as coaches, someone who gives actionable feedback and helps the young talent focus their growth and development efforts.
Constructive Feedback
Finally, Millennials desire constructive, actionable feedback. Long gone are the days when companies could rely solely on the year-end review to hash it all out. Your company will be much better off by investing time and effort into real-time feedback and coaching of young employees. Millennials are used to and understand how to course-correct as they go and in the end, you’ll save yourself a lot of headache (and heartache) by not putting off this crucial part of the employee growth process. Constructive, ongoing input from managers and/or mentors will help Millennial employees to feel like valued members of your team, which will foster loyalty toward your company.
Let The Records Company help in your quest to grow the young talent at your firm or company. We can handle your records retrieval needs, which frees up your time to focus on developing your employees and other higher value work. By partnering with us, you’ll also save money and man-hours because we aim to make records retrieval as streamlined and straightforward as possible. Sign up for a free account today to see how we can help simplify the records retrieval process for your company.
To learn more about working better with Millennials, check out our previous post on attracting and retaining young talent in your company.