4 Ways to Attract Best-Fit Early Careers Talent

How do you attract and retain young talent with future focussed behaviours that will go on to become a leader in your business?

Talent shortages and the new world of work have prompted a rethink of candidate attraction and hiring strategies. ?Now more than ever, current and future employees understand their value and are keen to join a firm that’s aligned with their goals, while also offering the support and rewards needed for career progression.?This is especially true for those who are just beginning their career journeys.?

Attracting this generation of job-seekers will require employers to be more authentic, digital, and proactive than ever before. Whether you’re recruiting on campus or for your apprenticeship program, you’ll need to find ways to accurately, efficiently attract the right-fit talent while also ensuring your process is robust enough to identify future leaders for your business.

To share some of my learnings and advice, below I outline four ways early careers talent acquisition teams can stay ahead of the curve and boost their hiring practices now.??

1. Be inclusive

It’s an obvious one – but lets break this down and dig deep into what this means? Expand your recruitment opportunities to attract more diverse talent: not everyone has the means to attend a prestigious private university, or may want to, so be sure to recruit at colleges and schools too. Especially as many young capable people, are now considering the non-university route as they want to earn as they learn. Being inclusive opens up your talent pool to high-potential candidates from different socioeconomic backgrounds, some of whom may be members of historically excluded groups.

With a robust assessment, you don’t need to rely on university credentials to tell you someone’s competencies, which allows you to expand your search pool without reducing the quality of your talent pipeline. Remove arbitrarily limiting factors from job descriptions for your entry-level roles, such as the requirement that candidates have a certain number of years of experience or particular grades. Assessments that measure skills, traits and competencies have much higher predictive validity than these legacy requirements do.

An example of the problem with attracting diverse talent (Source: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/access-and-participation-data-dashboard/ )

Do resist the urge to introduce positive discrimination or you are just shifting the bias from one group to another!

Your goal is to attract a wide pool of candidates, and then use fair assessments, that demonstrate no adverse impact, to identify those with the most potential.

Make sure your job postings are getting in front of diverse candidates, or do you need to seek out alternative sources with a more diverse pipeline? One way is to develop partnerships with professional organizations dedicated to historically excluded groups. Organisations such as:

NGTU Group is the leading UK organisation for apprenticeship and school leaver attraction. Building?on the very strong Not-Going-To-Uni website they have built an end to end recruitment marketing agency specialising in apprenticeship and school leaver attraction to support employers, training providers, colleges and more in hiring talent across the country, utilising websites, social media, in-house content production agency and more. You can view some of their case studies on how they have supported a wide range of clients in the early careers space.?

TapIn have over the last two years, connected with hundreds of thousands of Gen Z trendsetters and decision makers through proprietary networks and targeted social media strategies. Their youth-focused strategies help support Gen Z into the world of work and create impactful brand campaigns that cut through the noise. Every member of the TapIn team is a creator – their expertise helps to create the forward-thinking social content produced for their clients. Their creative designers, animators, project managers, marketing gurus and account managers all play a unique, yet pivotal role in delivering first-class results for all their clients. See what their clients have to say. ttps://employer.wearetapin.com/our-work

Finally, look for candidates who demonstrate initiative by joining professional groups or earning certifications online. Build out apprenticeships for diverse talent, especially for candidates who may not be able to afford traditional or formal education. Encourage employee resource or affinity group members to refer promising early career talent from their larger communities.

?2. Refine Your Employer Branding to Draw High-Potential Talent

Competitive pay and benefits are essential components of an attractive entry-level role. But high-potential candidates aren’t just looking for a job, even if the opening has these and other benefits. They want a career where they feel valued, developed, and moved into roles where they can reach their potential. Those possibilities should be reflected in the employer branding materials used to attract high-potential entry-level employees.

Create clear paths for mobility for each entry-level role you’re hiring for. Make those paths visible on your career site and materials used to attract candidates. This is especially important when hiring early career talent, because high-potential talent doesn’t want to feel stagnant in entry-level roles.

High-potential employees will be willing to commit to your company if you demonstrate an investment in them and their potential. In addition to the specific job training required for the role, be transparent about the options your company offers for long-term career paths and professional development. List the learning organizations you partner with, and emphasize that learning is part of the job.

Communicate that you want employees who are critical thinkers, innovators and change-makers.

To bring that commitment to life, highlight high-potential talent who started with your company as entry-level employees and show, in their own words, their career trajectory. Even if they aren’t in traditional leadership positions, demonstrate the ways your company helped them achieve their potential.

3. Know what behaviours you should be looking for and measuring

The pressure of profitability, customer satisfaction and growth are forcing organizations to reinvent themselves. Hiring young people who can adapt to the future has never been so important as we find ourselves in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. What good looks like today is different to tomorrow.

Seeking out young people who can learn, are agile and curious will allow your talent strategy to evolve and adapt to the challenges of the future of work environment

This approach allows your workforce to be?

·???????flexible

·???????seek self-improvement?

·???????and remain open to change

If you want to future-proof your workforce, your hiring needs to focus on talent with the ability and mindset to develop, upskill, reskill and learn new competencies as the environment, technologies and requirements change. In this environment, agility, curiosity and learnability are most closely associated with success.

These future competencies are not concerned with specifics, as we cannot predict what these are. Instead, we focus on being flexible, embracing change, and recognizing the necessity to upskill. Cultivating and hiring for these behaviors are essential in supporting the agility needed in the future.

?To find more about these foundational competencies and how they can boost your workforce, do download this fact sheet: Digital Readiness Factsheet (aon.com)

4. Use tools that offer careers advice to boost your applications with best-fit candidates

Today’s young talent is faced with an overwhelming variety of career options, ranging from apprenticeships, graduate schemes to entry-level jobs. It can be challenging to understand what the different roles look like day-to-day and whether they suit one’s skills and interests.?An organization’s culture can also be hard to grasp. Young talent may overlook sectors, organisations and roles they would be suited for, that align with their own personal values as they navigate the job market with limited knowledge and time.

Are you inspiring young people to consider your opportunities using a careers advisor pre-application?job navigator ?tool to inspire school/college leavers and grads to apply to your business?

Something like Aon's bespoke built MatchMe tool which helps young people find out if they match your culture and programmes/roles in a really engaging way?

They even receive a %age match score for your culture and their top suitable programmes.

Hosted on your careers site, shared on TikTok, Insta and other social media. Sent to universitiess, colleges and schools to improve diversity. MatchMe can of course be used to inspire?GenZ ?to consider?technical ,?digital ?and?engineering ?type roles.?

MatchMe can be available all year round so that young people can find out about your company and programmes and then register their interest, or when programmes/roles are live, apply directly.

Of course job navigator tools can also be used to discourage the wrong candidates from applying. An example of this is Serco who struggled with high staff turnover and applicants not having a realistic understanding of what working in a prison would be like. Implementing the Prisoner Officer Career Assistant helped talent to de-select themselves pre-application. This allowed Serco to focus on the best-fit candidates.

For more information on Early Careers recruiting, do listen in to our 25 minute early careers webinar with the Global Lead of Talent and Organisational Psychologist at Primark at Primark.

WEBINAR RECORDING Elevate your Early Careers Assessment Experience for Generation Z (aon.com)

Let’s continue the conversation! Feel free to contact me at [email protected] to learn more or message me through LinkedIn.

Aon’s Assessment Solutions can reshape your workforce to be more agile, responsive, and resilient to thrive in uncertainty.

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