Vern Howard

Recruiters exist to fill roles. For many, this is a simple and straightforward process: find a suitable candidate, connect them with the company, and make the offer. However, this transactional style of recruiting is heavily flawed and much more complex than meets the eye. It simply will not last much longer in the face of a diverse wave of Gen Z early talent.

While companies pressure recruiters to help them fulfill diversity and inclusivity goals, the old ways of doing things don't always benefit the business, especially when it becomes time to retain talent. Recruiters are incentivized to get diversity hires on board any way they can, which can lead to unsavory practices and misrepresentations of what life at the company is actually like.

Today's young talent is savvy. They know which companies walk the walk because they were raised with access to information at an unprecedented scale. Gen Z builds relationships online every day, both with brands and with people. Transactional relationships fade quickly, so to stand out, companies must do more to build relationships with the talent they want to attract and more importantly, retain.

Developing More Authentic Relationships

Companies seeking diverse talent cannot say one thing in recruitment and practice another set of principles in reality. Today's young talent has an impeccable radar for hypocrisy, and with the number of empty positions in need of brilliant minds growing every year, businesses cannot afford to limit their recruitment processes with poor decisions.

Young people in minority groups can appreciate the presence of a company at a recruitment event or the significance of a donation or partnership. To capitalize on that attention, however, companies must go beyond the transactional and nurture the relationships that bud during the first touchpoint. What happens next?

In most cases, people who meet recruiters at events receive zero meaningful follow-up, even if they had great conversations. Any continuing conversations that do occur are at the discretion of the individual recruiters in attendance. Without standardized channels or practices for nurturing relationships, potential connections fade before they even have a chance to grow.

Even if they wanted to connect, attendees often don’t create direct lines of communication with hiring managers or specialists in their field. So when a candidate wants to talk about the company's vision for a specific department, recruiters may not have all the answers. It’s only by creating more opportunities for development of authentic relationships between company and candidate that businesses can bridge the gap.

Social Media and Data Create a New Conversation

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, companies had begun to experiment with more online recruiting options. Now that the world lives online, digital is everything in recruiting, and businesses must learn how to make meaningful connections without the physical components they have relied on and defaulted to for years.

Two resources stand out in this struggle: social media and data. On social media, employees live their lives as usual, but they do not represent only themselves. Every individual's personal brand is a small piece of the employer's brand in the eyes of prospective candidates. For diversity hirees, the attitude of current employees (and the demographics of those employees) say a lot about whether companies take their commitments to diversity seriously.

When companies spend millions of dollars to appear diverse, they should remember to invest those dollars internally as well. Gen Z talent can quickly realize when a diversity-friendly exterior doesn't quite match internal priorities and policies.

Businesses do have tools to help them improve, though. With more parts of the recruitment process now online, companies can turn their expertise in data analysis toward recruiting to understand where and how to source and retain more diverse early talent. This data should go beyond the number of candidates and their backgrounds to identify where companies find their best and most diverse candidates, how those candidates feel about the company, and what the business can do better to attract more top talent.

Continued evolution of early talent recruiting and increased focus on diversity will require more companies to evaluate their strategies. Younger generations expect more than meager effort from companies looking to retain their services long-term. They want to join businesses with missions to increase diversity and commitments that hold up under scrutiny. Only by tackling these challenges directly can companies meet their diversity goals and stay ahead of the quickly evolving recruitment standards.