Harvard Biz Review recently posted an article titled “How Can Companies Attract the Best College Talent” by Sanjeev Agrawal at Collegefeed about college hiring strategies and tactics. Agrawal says that Collegefeed met with more than 300 companies that are looking to hire fresh, young talent.
One of the major problems among the companies interviewed, Agrawal said, is:
“92% believe they have a ‘brand problem’ when it comes to their efforts; this problem is often expressed as the fact that ‘not everyone can be an employer like Facebook.’ In other words, large, well-established companies feel they simply can’t be the newest thing out there generating buzz with Millennials.”
To help these and other companies truly understand what they can do to make opportunities more enticing for top talent, Collegefeed turned around and interviewed 15,000 millennials (60% still in college and 40% recent grads) and asked the following questions:
1. What are the top three companies you want to work for?
2. What are the top three things you look for when considering an employer?
3. How do you generally discover companies and create an impression about them (social media, product usage, campus events, other ways)?
Not surprisingly, the top companies college grads say they’d like to work for included the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. At Mentoring Complete, we are most interested in the answers to question number two, and believe you, our blog readers, will be as well. According to the survey, the top two things that millennials look for in an employer are “people and culture fit” and “career potential.”
Agrawal says:
“This data leaves one key takeaway: It is imperative to focus on communicating your culture and career growth to potential employees. The two fundamental questions that young job seekers ask, and that companies need to answer are: ‘What is it like to work there?’ and ‘What kind of growth can I expect?'”
Culture and career growth, those are two things that lend themselves perfectly to mentoring. Mentoring helps create a collaborative corporate culture, one where the theme, if you will, is “we want to see our people succeed and that’s the type of environment we endeavor to create and support.”
As for career growth, successful mentoring relationships can help mentees advance. Because it helps them transform personally and professionally. Everything they learn during a mentoring relationship poises them to advance.