How to Sell This Millennial With Your Job Description

By Uloop Guest Writer on May 10, 2012

While some managers and recruiters are annoyed and fed up with the stereotypically whiny and self-entitled millennials, Generation Y is predicted to comprise nearly 75% of the world’s workforce by 2025, according to the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation.

Photo by halitll on flickr.com

I’m a millennial, and I’m excited to be part of that 75%. But what are companies and hiring managers doing to attract the best of us?

I think for many active, millennial job seekers it starts with the job description. And let’s be honest – most job descriptions are awful. They make companies sound boring. They make the work seem tedious. And they all seem to require the typical “organized, ambitious, go-getter” applicants, as if each job description was just a copied and pasted from the next.

As a millennial, here are a few things I’d like to see in more job descriptions:

1. Reasons why I should want to work for the company. Hiring managers should use the job description to flat-out sell the company and the open position. Millennials don’t only want to know what the roles and responsibilities are – we want to know why the company is great and why we should want to work there.

“The language of the job description should reflect the company’s culture,” says Brie Weiler Reynolds, a millennial and social media manager. “Instead of using the same old wording to describe the desired qualifications, be a little creative when talking about your preferred applicants.”

2. Reasons why the position matters to the company. I love my current job because I know how my actions drive company growth. Understanding how my job contributes to the organization is one of the biggest motivators for me and my Gen Y colleagues. That’s because “millennials want to know how their work will impact a company, how they’ll be connected to decision-makers, and where they fit in the grand scheme of things,” adds Weiler Reynolds.

3.  Talk about what the job could do for me. While it’s motivating to understand how a position would drive business results, I also want to know how it’s going to make me a more desirable candidate when I start looking for my next job. What skills could I gain from this position? What connections am I going to make? How visible is this position within the organization?

4. Tell your company story, quickly. Many times a hiring manager or recruiter will include a standard company description within a job posting, or sometimes they won’t include one at all. Companies should take that opportunity to quickly convey their mission and how it came to be as it pertains to the kind of applicant they’re looking for.

“Just like you have a mission statement internally to motivate your team, you need one that is outwardly facing that excites the right people,” says Ryan Ruud, millennial and marketing director.

Are you a millennial? What do you want to see in a job description?

This is a guest post by Jennifer King of Software Advice. She writes about various topics related to HR software, and with particular interest in HR best practices, trends in the industry, and HR technology. Her background is in corporate communications and writing, and when she isn’t writing about software, you can find her at local venues listening to live music or hanging out at Zilker Park with her friends. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism.

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