We’re looking to hire a Gen Y but can’t find any!

Made Essential Reading on 28 July 2010 Sam Rudland

I’ve just had a bad experience from a young guy who was due to start with us today as a Junior Digital Marketing Assistant but didn’t show. No email, no phone call, nothing. We were genuinely concerned about him as he is a bright young man with an excellent degree who said he was desperate to get into web development. He appeared to have common sense and manners when we interviewed him on two occasions so we assumed that if he’d changed his mind he’d have contacted us before today.

When we finally tracked him down he said he’d had a good think about the job over the weekend and had decided that it was ‘too desk based’!!!! How else did he expect to develop websites?!

I have personally recruited a number of Gen Ys straight from University who have proved to be excellent members of the team and who have progressed through our agency and still remain with us today after 3 years.

What I’m finding today though is that the Gen Ys we approach through recruitment portals such as www.cv-library.co.uk hardly ever reply to our emails or our voicemails which is the complete opposite to the older candidates we approach. For those that aren’t aware of CV Library it’s a great online tool that enables the recruiter to search through thousands of CVs for candidates with the right experience and the right salary expectations. These are individuals clearly looking for work that have taken the time to upload their CV to an online database for recruiters within the last few weeks not people that have had their CV on the site for months. In the current climate I doubt the Gen Ys we have approached have been inundated with job approaches, so why don’t they reply? Surely even if they have found a position they should have the manners to return the phone call or email and say as much. This has perplexed me somewhat….

We’ve tried promoting our vacancies via social media to attract the Gen Y audience but I’m finding the only applicants we are getting via this route are from overseas outsourcers (who are very proactive indeed!). Yet we are led to believe that Gen Y are using social media. If this is the case how do I attract them as nothing I’ve tried so far has worked.

If anyone has any good suggestions within the online space that I can use to attract the Gen Ys then please let me know as I for one am not giving up on the Gen Ys due to one bad experience. Like any segment of the population there will be the good and the bad, but I’ve got firsthand experience of the great assets they can be for my business and I want to hire more of them!

If you’re a Gen Y with an interest in digital marketing and you’re looking for a great job opportunity with a Gen Y friendly company based near Oxford/Reading in the UK please get in touch!

The job details can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/2cus532

Sam Rudland

MD