Millennials are Shaping the U.S. Workforce
Millennials are a generation that will shape the economy for decades to come. Today, the insurance industry is facing a challenge of recruiting millennials to replace retiring baby boomers. By 2020, 46 percent of all U.S. workers will be millennials. It is essential now more than ever for insurance employers to build a recruiting strategy centered around mobile-friendly applications and a digital hiring process to be able to attract and evaluate a new generation of educated workers.
Benefits of Attracting Millennials
Millennials current view of the insurance industry is not very positive. According to the Insurance Journal, 53 percent of millennials perceive the insurance industry as not being innovative and as having a poor public image (65 percent). Moreover, 71 percent of millennials want to work with people in their age group yet they perceive the insurance industry as predominantly employed by older workers.
Most millennials are considered tech savvy multitaskers, which is a huge benefit for an insurance agency. In addition, millennials are motivated by more than just making money. Most millennials want to work for a company that practices social responsibility and gives back to the community. Millennials have the education, tech-savviness, and passion to improve your agency’s processes and culture.
If agencies try to avoid hiring millennials, they may be inadvertently hurting their long-term sales. When an entire industry is unattractive to millennial workforce, it can be an indicator that the industry as a whole is less likely to appeal to millennial customers as well, perhaps forgoing the traditional insurance sales process in favor of self-service online or through an app. Like every generation before them, millennials are more likely to listen to their peers, and a millennial insurance salesperson will have much more first hand insight into how to connect with this audience and deliver an effective message.
Using Technology to Attract Millennials
There’s a pretty simple answer to the question, “where do I even begin with recruiting millennials?” Start by formalizing your hiring process with an applicant tracking system, or ATS. There are many applicant tracking systems out there, but agencies will benefit most from a system that empowers hiring managers to attract millennials to a mobile-optimized careers page, showcasing company culture and open positions right on an applicant’s smartphone. Agents and recruiters stand to benefit greatly from prioritizing a great mobile candidate experience and distributing job posts to search engines and social media. In fact, job searches from a mobile device have increased dramatically over the past few years. In 2014, 50 percent of job searches in the United States were done on a mobile phone.
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook should be constantly updated and have frequent posts and links to the agents’ careers page in order to let job seekers know there are open positions. It is important for recruiters (or agents who manage recruiting themselves) to update their LinkedIn profile as well to let their connections know they are hiring. Millennials are mostly visual learners and rely on reviews before making a purchase on the internet. Similarly, these job seekers will look up the employers they are interested in on LinkedIn to get an idea of who they will work for. From our experience, most online job seekers will apply to jobs on Indeed, the job search engine that produces 50% of hires made online in the US. Therefore, it is crucial for insurance agents to build a strong online employment brand and begin recruiting the growing millennial workforce.
Recruiting Millennials Made Easy
CareerPlug can help insurance agencies attract the millennials they need. CareerPlug makes the hiring process easier and attractive for millennials with our specialized Careers Page and hiring tools. Moreover, CareerPlug works along with job boards like Indeed in order to help agencies attract more applicants. To learn more about how CareerPlug can help you turn your agency into a talent magnet, request a demo today!
