Hiring people is one thing. Getting them engaged about their employee experience after they are hired is something else. However, in the job market we find ourselves in 2016, the two activities are critically important and intrinsically linked.
The job market conditions are changing. Fortune ran an article at the end of last year that said, “It looks like the ‘jobless recovery’ has finally breathed its last breath.” The hiring market is shifting to favor the candidate instead of the employer for the first time in almost a decade. Furthermore, Generation Z (referring to those born after 1994) is poised to enter the workforce after college graduation this coming May. This generation, taking cues from the millennials, places a high value on the ‘fun’ factor of where they work.
What These Changing Job Market Conditions Mean to You
Employee engagement is critical to your organization’s hiring efforts. As the Fortune article points out, the Generation Z, fun-workplace-seeking employees will comprise at least 20% of the workforce by 2019, just three short years from now. When considering your offer, this new generation will dig deeper into social media to find where the best employee experiences exist. If your company doesn’t have an engaged workforce that is spreading the word through fun updates with plenty of thumbs up emoticons, you could end up with a sad-faced emoji come recruitment time!
This problematic outcome might find its solution in your employee ambassadors.
Employee Ambassadors Help Create a Positive Social Media Presence
Employee Ambassadors represent the most engaged members of your team. Inspired by your company’s mission, they feel personal satisfaction from going above and beyond what’s expected of them to achieve it. They elevate the experience for all employees, which can translate into a positive social media presence for your employee experience.
What do we mean by positive social media presence? Consider what adjectives you associate with the employee experience at Google, Starbucks, or Virgin Airlines? You likely associate each of them with a positive employee experience.
Now consider Amazon, McDonald’s, or the DMV (of any state in the US). What kind of adjectives are we talking about there? Not the same ones, are they? Amazon learned the hard way last year what happens when the perception of your employee experience is less than satisfactory and those opinions make it into the social media machine.
If you were a Generation Z employee considering an entry level job at Google or Amazon, and the offers were similar in compensation and benefits, which would you pick? That’s the effect of a positive social media presence in your hiring efforts.
Employee Ambassadorship Can Recruit Your Generation Z Workforce
Employee Ambassadors are partly responsible for what you know about the employee experience at these brands. Our four-part online Employee Engagement course covers the employee ambassador concept. It also explains the elements needed for engaging employees, how to move highly-engaged employees to ambassadorship, and how ambassadorship translates into an excellent Customer Experience.
Employee Ambassadors are valuable to your employee engagement and Customer Experience efforts. They also have another significant influence on your organization: they can help you hire the best employees for your team from Generation Z.
The job market has changed with the control moving toward the candidate. With increased competition for the new wave of employees, it’s important to make sure you have the employee experience that attracts the best employees for your organization. In other words, you want Generation Z to give you an A+ when it comes to employee experience.
What grade would Generation Z give your employee experience?
To improve your experience join our Certified Foundation CEM Training Course starting on April 8th.
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If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:
Training Employees on Nonverbal Clues
Amazon’s Destructive Culture Exposed—Or Not?
What We Can Learn from Google’s Empowered Culture
Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s leading Customer experience consultancy & training organizations. Colin is an international author of five bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter & Periscope @ColinShaw_CX