Millennials are the largest workforce on the planet — but what they want in a role is quite different to the generations that came before them.
A recent Deloitte study showed that purpose-driven work matters to millennial employees.
The annual Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which gauges generational attitudes towards work, found nearly 90% of millennials consider a sense of purpose important for job satisfaction and wellbeing.
Half of those surveyed said they had rejected assignments or employers based on personal ethics, while 75% said an organisation’s societal impact was important when choosing where to work.
Izzy Fenwick, founder of recruitment platform Futureful, says millennial employees are highly informed and more socially and environmentally conscious than previous generations.
“A couple of things that really stood out [from the Deloitte survey] is that millennials want to work for a company that has a higher purpose,” she says.
“They want to see what the company is trying to achieve other than just selling products to buyers.”
Futureful’s own research showed sustainability is also key to attracting the best millennial talent.
“When we spoke to hiring managers, they were seeing an increase in that millennial age bracket asking during interviews, ‘What's your sustainability strategy for this company?’
“And the hard part for many hiring managers is that sustainability isn't a core part of their function, but it's becoming a core part of how that workforce thinks about the bigger picture of what their work life means.”
Motivating millennials
Fenwick says some of the things that drive millennials – or any generation – around their choices are generational characteristics.
“It's not just that millennials woke up one day and decided to make choices in a certain way,” she says.
“Millennials are digital pioneers; they really grew up with the internet at their fingers and they also grew up with social media.
“They've had more access to information than previous generations did when it came to their decision making – and there's things that they've learned over time that makes it harder for them to ignore when it comes to thinking about who they want to work for.”
Millennials also want to be able to bring their whole self to work, Fenwick says.
“[Millennials] are a generation that grew up posting every little bit about themselves online. They don't want to turn off sharing themselves when they come to work either,” she says.
“A number of those things that [millennials] want is definitely a factor of their upbringing, rather than they all just woke up one day and decided to be, as some baby boomers describe them, more sassy or demanding in the workplace.”
Reinventing the job ad?
Businesses need to look at how they’re trying to attract millennial workers, Fenwick says.
“A job ad is often pretty limiting in terms of providing [people] with all the information that they’re looking for,” she says.
“When we were doing some research about how millennials look for work, we found that they'd often find a job that might look interesting and then they'd spend half an hour googling that company, trying to find the information they actually needed to make a choice.”
Millennials want to understand the organisation they might be working for.
“Who they work for is as important as what they do,” Fenwick says.
If organisations want to incentivise people to apply, she says they need to move away from the type of job ad that is 80% about the role and 20% about the company and its culture.
“I think it needs to be closer to 50-50, especially since that technical criteria around the role is going to be part of that conversation in interviews. But that early hook for millennials needs to be about more than just a job.”
However, businesses should also be careful about the claims they make in an ad.
“Millennials can be quite suspicious of organisations; we've seen a bit of an erosion of trust between organisations and talent in the last few years,” Fenwick says.
“I think being really radically transparent in the way you express yourself as an organisation is important because you don't want to over-promise and under-deliver.”
Why chase millennial talent?
Millennials are important to understand from a workforce perspective, Fenwick says.
“They're currently the age bracket that's about 28 to 43, so you can see how that is a pretty major chunk of that mid-tier workforce,” she says.
“Being able to understand how to create a workforce from that demographic that feels really engaged and productive is going to have a big positive impact on business.”
Fenwick says this could also go some way to addressing New Zealand’s productivity issues.
“Our system is really designed around roles and jobs when it comes to hiring but a large number of the workforce are interested in more than just a job – so I do wonder what increase in productivity organisations might see if they found different ways to connect with a generation that is inherently wired a bit differently.”
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