Finchway Market Intelligence · recruit, retain, and maximize the performance of young talent under...

Finchway Market Intelligence

Jerry Zhang

The millennial wave: Recruiting, screening, and

hiring young talent in the

age of change

The Finchway Group | 1

The Finchway Group is a strategy and HR

consultancy that helps world-class companies

recruit, retain, and maximize the performance

of young talent under 30. We know young

people, how they think, how they behave, and

what motivates them, because the entire

consulting team, including partners, is under 30.

We advise clients on how to systematically

ensure young employees do not deceive them

and are motivated to work hard.


PREFACE

There are roughly 1.3 billion people in

the world who are between the ages of

15-24. This is the group of people who

will have to take over in the workforce

for the aging baby boomer generation

during the next 15 years. The shift in

how talent management and human

resources is done will be dramatic.

Some companies will benefit from this

shift and others will suffer, but most

definitely, everyone will be affected.

This will be the first time in the

knowledge economy, where baby

boomers (who pioneered the

knowledge economy) will not be able

to contribute to the companies that they

started. This will be the first time that

an entire generation will have grown up

in the presence of advanced consumer

digital technology, the most prominent

piece being the internet. This will be

the first time where very few workers

in developed countries will be truly

concerned with survival needs, spurring

a vastly different incentive dynamic.

RESEARCH

The research that we did involved

interviewing and surveying over 200

hiring managers, human resources

professionals, and young employees.

We emphasized a balance of both

quantitative and qualitative techniques

in our methodology. Only using

quantitative techniques would have

sacrificed the rich insights that talking

in-depth with participants brought.

Only using qualitative techniques

would have missed the concrete

judgments and comparisons that can

only be derived from numbers.

It helped that the research was about

the people we know best, young talent.

The company is made up exclusively of

young people and herein lies

Finchway’s advantage: we have an

immersive understanding of how young

talent thinks because we live, work,

and hang out with them.


When recruiting for any industry and

function, regardless of candidates’

ages, there is a scale in the quality of

talent that an organization is able to

attract. The goal of anybody who works

in recruitment is to make sure that we

are able to hire people at the top of that

scale of talent.

Needless to say, young people are wild

cards. There is huge disparity between

a great candidate and a mediocre one or

even one who is only good. In

comparison to more experienced

professionals, young people have had

significantly less time to be able to

polish and demonstrate key skills. Our

job is to gauge potential that is both

unrealized and unproven – sometimes

we are able to hire a young person who

projects into a great talent, while other

times we are disappointed.

Both recruiters and hiring managers

who we interviewed agreed that the

experiences they had with young hires

were usually on either extreme: they

were overwhelmed either by how good

or how bad the hire was. This is why

the basis for the recruiting process must

be based on the ceiling, as opposed to

the ledge. In other words, we must look

for ideal, instead of looking for “good

enough”. With young people, good

enough is rarely good enough.

In sourcing, we must use channels and

touch points that encourage

uncommitted candidates to drop off. In

screening, strategies must circumvent

dishonesty to show the candidate’s true

colours. And all of this should be under

the umbrella of an employment brand

that engages and connects with high

achievers.

RECRUITING.


Layered self-selection is a different

way of looking at recruiting. It is a

principle more than a prescriptive

process, as the dynamic in every

industry would suggest different ways

of execution. Essentially, we actually

try to lower the number of applicants

we have by letting bad candidates filter

themselves out. Consider this: if you

wanted to hire five people, would it not

be ideal if only the best five people

applied at all? We can systematically

ensure that we spend less resources

sifting through hundreds of résumés

and more on building meaningful pre-

employment relationships with

excellent candidates.

Recruiters and hiring managers told us

that they consistently got several

hundred applications for junior

positions and even more for recent

graduate positions. These applications

take time to go through. However, we

found that most recruiters worked at

organizations that use strategies that

“streamline” the process of initial

résumé screens. We cannot afford the

time to even read most applications so

we use junior employees or worse,

keyword software, to dispose of a large

chunk of what should be read. Herein

lies the first problem in the current

recruitment process. When we get too

many applications to properly screen,

we use processes that often incorrectly

filter out great talent who are simply

bad at writing exclusively in keywords.

On the other side of the conversation,

young candidates themselves said that

the average amount of time they put

into each application is under 5

minutes. The current state of recruiting

processes has ingrained an emphasis on

quantity of applications someone can

put out, rather than the quality of the

application. Let us take a step back to

look at the problem with both sides.

71% of young candidates spend less

than 5 minutes per application and that

results in several hundred applications

for each posting. The hiring manager

does not have time to look at most of

these applications and for the ones she

does, she spends just over 30 seconds

on. The way we recruit makes it

systematically impossible to distinguish

the best candidates from the rubble.

Control the Distribution of

the Posting

You will find more strategies for

layered self-selection throughout the

recruiting section but the distribution of

the posting is where it starts. 33 of the

34 hiring managers and recruiters that

were interviewed said that their main

channels for distribution were job

boards, job fairs, and universities.

Job Fairs29%

Job Boards

44%

Universities24%

Other3%

Primary Channels for Recruiting Young Employees

Job Fairs Job Boards Universities Other

Channels Used for Recruiting Young Employees

LAYERED

SELF-

SELECTION.


There is however, a fundamental

problem with these three systems.

Their priority (and how they make their

money) is to make sure somebody from

their platform gets your job. They want

to get more people jobs, as opposed to

getting you a smaller number of very

qualified hires. We recommend that

you use more closed communities,

events, or lists to get the word out

about your posting, especially for high-

prestige positions.

Find groups and events that are small

pockets of extremely high talent. In

every industry, there are groups and

organizations that consistently attract

amazing young talent. Build long-term

relationships with these pockets.

Equally important, amazing talent

usually hangs out with amazing talent.

Excellent past hires have a handful of

friends that are just as excellent – make

a proactive effort to ask them to refer

these friends to fill new positions.

A large job board gets you a large

number of candidates. Controlled

distribution gets you a smaller number

of great candidates.

What Corporate Recruiters

Can Learn From Baseball

Scouts

Look for tools.

This may sound counterintuitive (who

wants an organization filled with

tools?). To shed some light on the

context, baseball scouts are people that

professional, amateur, and collegiate

teams hire to find great players and a

“tool” is the name they have given to a

key baseball skill. In fact, scouts are so

excited about these tools that they have

devised a player evaluation system

based on five universally accepted

tools. The “5 tools” are hitting for

contact, hitting for power, running,

fielding, and throwing. A player who

can do several of these things is called

“toolsy”.

Baseball scouts are much more

concerned about finding players with

these tools than they are about filling a

specific position on the diamond. They

know that if they can find a player who

has the right tools, he can probably

play the position that they need him to

play. This is the opposite of how

corporate recruitment works – we are

much more concerned about which

positions are in immediate need than in

candidates’ skills.

In today’s rapidly changing work

environment, positions are becoming

meaningless. What an employee does

today will change in a week, depending

on what her business group’s priorities

are. More importantly, human

resources professionals who were

polled estimated that 63% of new hires

under the age of 30 will have a position

change within the organization within

two years. The position that you are

supposedly filling will be different in

nature within a week of your hire’s

start date and she will most likely not

be in that position in two years.

A skills profile transcends time more

effectively. Great recruiters are able to

0 2 4 6 8

22-30

31-40

41-50

50+

Length of Time Spent in One Position (By Age)


stimulate dialogue with hiring

managers to understand not only the

position they need filled today, but the

skills their team will continue to need

in the mid to long-term. An exercise

that we have found effective at

Finchway is to sit down with a manager

and list out skills that her team needs,

then cross off skills that she feels she

has enough of on the team. Recruiters

can then look for candidates with both

position-specific and non-position-

specific skills.

Watch people do what you want

them to do.

To look for great baseball players,

baseball scouts go to baseball games

and baseball practices to watch players

play baseball. It seems to make sense.

Even with the evolution of statistics

and sabermetrics in baseball, teams

continue to believe in scouts’ uncanny

ability to recognize talent when they

see it.

In recruitment, we should source where

we can screen. Put differently, we

should find ways to watch candidates

showcase their abilities and build

relationships with the candidates that

have showcased well. The contention

with this idea and analogy is that

baseball scouts have it easier. All sport

is structured in a way that there are

organized situations where players can

be watched (games, practices,

tournaments, showcases).

Actually, many functions have these

same organized situations, especially

for campus recruitment. It is however,

a scary indicator of how detached we

have become from candidates that we

do not know of these situations. 22 of

the professionals we talked to have

wanted to hire a developer,

programmer, or IT professional at some

point. However, not a single one knew

what a “hackathon” is. Essentially, a

hackathon is an event where

participants gather in a room, usually

for 24 hours, to create some sort of

useful application from scratch.

Oftentimes, what these people create in

a day would have taken larger

organizations three months. From a

recruiter’s perspective, this is a

goldmine. Imagine having a room of

several hundred potential candidates

who are passionate enough about

programming to sacrifice sleep and a

weekend for it. In addition, when you

watch them present what they have

created after the “hacking period” has

ended, you will literally be seeing them

do what you would want to hire them

to do.

These organized situations exist not

only for technical skills, but also for

skills such as marketing, sales, and

consulting.


In a hyper-competitive business

landscape, organizations now have less

access to great talent than ever. Still,

we remain too focused on ourselves

and not enough on the candidates. The

shift from being organization-centric to

being candidate-centric is subtle but

impactful. A candidate-centric

screening process starts by trying to get

the most accurate, objective, and real

picture of each candidate’s strengths

and weaknesses, instead of

immediately looking for fit within the

organization.

There is a problem that most

organizations have not adapted to

quickly enough in today’s young talent

market: young people lie. Candidates

of every age lie of course, but now

artificial inflation of one’s

achievements and qualifications is

being taught at a macro scale to young

people in the developed world. There

are now mandatory classes that every

student must take to learn how to make

themselves look better than they

actually are. This has become the single

greatest concern for recruiters and

hiring managers in the screening

process: undetectable misrepresentation

and dishonesty by candidates.

We have developed the Finchway

Method of Screening, a method whose

main priority is to ensure that managers

get a real and accurate representation of

every candidate, without spending

significantly more time or resources.

Evaluation by Project

80% of hiring managers and 74% of

human resources professionals that we

interviewed said that they felt that they

were not satisfied with the

effectiveness of current screening

processes. By nature, résumés and

interviews are not conducive to

evaluating skillsets, especially for

young people who have not had many

experiences to talk or write about.

When a candidate talks or writes about

qualifications, we become biased

toward natural speakers or writers,

even if those skills are irrelevant to the

job at hand. More importantly, the

organization becomes susceptible to

misrepresentation.

We prescribe a project task to be

integrated into the screening process.

This is an assignment that the candidate

gets between interviews or after résumé

screening and before their first

interview. The task should be

representative of something that the

candidate may be doing during their

job. For instance, a developer could be

asked to write a simple program using

tools that your organization uses and a

marketing associate could be asked to

prepare an analysis of a segment of

your target market. The project should

have realistic specifications and a tight

deadline to simulate a real work

situation.

Various formats of observation can be

used. They can be asked to send the

hiring manager a document, deck, or

proposal for review. They can be asked

to present what they have come up with

0102030405060Resume

Interview

LinkedIn

None

Where Young Candidates Say They Have Misrepresented Themselves

CANDIDATE-

CENTRIC

SCREENING.


in five minutes during their interview.

As a recruiter, you can observe if they

go above and beyond during their

process of completing the work. Have

they quickly replied to ask questions to

clarify the problem? Have they reached

out to appropriate people in the

organization on their own accord, to

ask them questions? A combination of

observing the quality of their work,

their punctuality, and the process that

they take to complete the work will

show you how a candidate handles real

job-specific scenarios.

Hiring managers can be intimidated by

this process because it sounds time-

consuming to create and evaluate.

However, once the process is broken

down into concrete tasks, we begin to

see that the time investment is small.

At the beginning of a hiring cycle,

there is an initial investment of an hour

to create the project outline document

that will be sent to applicants.

Evaluation of the projects can happen

during the interview, adding no time at

all. Alternately, projects can even be

used as a stage between the résumé and

the interview, to weed out poor efforts,

actually reducing the time spent on

making the hire.

Companies that have tried this part of

the method alone have found a drastic

shift in how they think about hiring.

They now see that it is possible and

even easy to get significantly richer

information on a candidate’s potential

in the workplace.

Learning-Based Screening

Not surprisingly, 100% of the HR

professionals and hiring managers that

we interviewed said that they would

like new young hires to be useful for

more than three years. 100% of them

also said that their industry or company

had changed significantly in the past

three years. Employees that are with

your company long-term will have to

continue to learn the new information

they must know to thrive through

change.

Young employees are less fixed in

position or specialization than ever, at a

time when the world is also changing

the fastest it has ever changed. The

result is that the best young employees

are now the ones who learn

passionately, fervently, and quickly. A

proven track record and positive

attitude toward effective learning is

more valuable than anything for the 21st

century employer.

A variation of the project task that

evaluates learning can be used. Ask

candidates to learn a highly technical

skill related to the position they are

applying for. The skill should be

something that the candidate has never

heard of before and something that is

not easy to quickly learn. For example,

for a financial analyst position,

candidates could be asked to learn a

very technical type of valuation or

financial projection.

During the interview, they can then be

asked to “teach” what they have

learned within the time constraint. It

will be quite apparent which candidates


have a natural inclination for learning

and were willing to take the time to

complete the exercise. The difference

in depth, detail, and coherence of what

great candidates versus what good or

mediocre ones will say is enormous.

Because candidates will be asked to

complete a real task in a time

constraint, their true colours will come

out in the quality of their work.

15 Interview Questions

Although it is certainly not sufficient,

the interview is still an important part

of the hiring process. Still, we stress

that interviews are breeding grounds

for deception by smooth-talking

candidates. It is important to use

questions that are unexpected and

require every candidate to think deeply

about what is being asked. These

questions are often more specific in

nature, as general questions invite

general pre-prepared answers. We are

looking for candid, unfiltered thinking

from candidates rather than a

regurgitation of age-old interview

clichés.

We have asked hiring managers, HR

professionals, and candidates

themselves to recount some of the most

effective interview questions they have

ever used or encountered. The

following 13 questions can be used in

an interview for almost any function.

Learning

1. What is an opinion you had last

year that you now realize is

wrong? Explain why.

This takes some deep thought

and it is difficult to quickly make

up an opinion because opinions

are so ingrained in who a person

is.

2. Teach me something uncommon

that you know a lot about and

that is not intuitive or easy to

learn.

People who learn quickly can

usually explain a concept with

high degrees of clarity and depth.

3. [Ask an extremely technical

question. Give them a computer

and tell them to answer the

question using 3 Google

searches.]

Google is the world’s most

efficient teacher. This is not a test

of Google skills but rather a test

of how well a candidate can

absorb and process a small

amount of information to

extrapolate more advanced

conclusions.

Passion

4. Somebody who works in a rival

industry says their job is better

than this one. How do you argue

with them?

The context of debate brings out

a certain competitiveness for

those who are passionate about

the job at hand.


5. What is a big over-arching

problem in this field that you

would like to solve?

People who are passionate and

know an industry should see the

problems in that industry.

6. Who is a person or company in

this field that you really admire

and look up to?

People who are truly passionate

about a field know about the

good work done in their field.

They also know the people or

companies behind this good

work.

Creativity for Solving Business

Problems

1. Make a convincing argument for

how a traffic cone could help our

business.

An unconventional and creative

question to test a candidate’s

understanding of your business

objectives.

2. Give me three metrics of how you

think I should measure your

performance, if you get this job.

Test that they understand how

their job would relate to the

business’s objectives.

3. Give me three metrics of how you

think my boss should measure my

performance.

Test that they have some intuitive

sense of how the business group

works.

4. The following are three tasks that

we may ask you to do if you are

hired. [List three tasks] Please

tell me how you would prioritize

these tasks and the thinking

process that went into your

order.

Evaluate the thoroughness of

their thinking process in

prioritizing actual tasks in the

job.

Technical Skills

1. Delve deeply into an experience

they had.

Look for the candidate to explain

the nitty-gritty of a relevant

experience, instead of just high-

level strategy. People who truly

had instrumental roles will know

about the little, seemingly

insignificant things that made a

project successful or

unsuccessful.

2. What is something specific in this

field that you want to learn more

about?

You have to know a lot to know

exactly what you do not know.

You have to know even more to

know what you want to know.

3. If you were in my spot, what are

the questions you would ask a

candidate to test the technical

skills needed for this job?

Those who know what they need

to know will know the questions

that should be asked to test this

knowledge.


More than half of the HR professionals

that we interviewed said that they feel

that candidate sourcing is too

expensive. The idea of the employment

brand becomes attractive when we

realize what it can do to attract

excellent candidates without constant

dedicated spend on sourcing.

Tackling the employment brand calls

for a report all on its own, especially

when we discuss channels,

sponsorships, and brand associations.

However, there are a few core brand

values that all of this should be built

upon. The messaging and positioning

of an employment brand must be

segmented to speak to different groups

differently. For young people, three key

values will resonate and should be

spotlighted.

We save the world.

We see all around us today that

companies are realizing that consumers

pay more for brands that are good for

the world. Similarly, potential

employees, especially younger ones,

want to work for companies that they

perceive as ethical, responsible, or

community-oriented. Awareness of

world issues has increased amongst

millennials because of the spread of

digital information. Equally important

is the digital connectivity that makes it

ever more important for the company

they work for to make them look good

to their friends. Positive impact can

take many shapes and forms, all of

which can be measured and

broadcasted as part of an employment

branding effort.

We are weird and we love

that you are too.

Many standout companies with happy,

productive, and most importantly, loyal

employees have certain eccentricities

that make the workplace unique. These

eccentricities become ingrained in both

the culture and employment brand and

can make young employees feel more

comfortable and drawn to your

authenticity.

Google has their famous slide in

Mountain View and Achievers has an

official company beverage (a mixture

of Red Bull and Crown Royal scotch

whiskey). However, less radical

approaches can be just as effective.

Funky sock contests, free chocolate

bars, and 7-PM trashcan basketball

20%

20%

22%

14%

10%

6%

8%

Most Important Aspects of Employment Brand for Young Employees

Makes a product that interests me,20%

Positive impact on the world, 20%

Leader in its market, 22%

Generally unique and eccentric,14%

Well-known brand name, 10%

Young startup company, 6%

Other, 8%

THE

EMPLOYMENT

BRAND.


leagues are all approaches that large

traditional companies have taken to

show their “weird” side.

We are the best at what we

do.

Elite candidates want to work for elite

companies. In every discipline and

industry, there are a handful of

companies that young talent almost

universally agrees upon as the elite

companies to work for. Those fortunate

enough to be recruiting for one of these

incumbents should take advantage of

their already excellent employment

brand.

Still, smaller companies should not be

discouraged. Most companies can make

a genuine claim to be unique in how

good they are at something and smaller

companies should make their niche

work for them. Your company may be

the best-quality, oldest, newest, most

loved, fastest growing, most

innovative, or most technically brilliant

in a geographic region, industry, or

client segment. Think about what you

are uniquely strong in and ensure that it

is conveyed to candidates.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerry Zhang is Managing Partner and

CEO at Finchway Group. Previously,

he served as Founder and CEO of

Glowstik Social Marketing, a digital

agency that worked with brands that

looked to target young consumers. He

has spoken about the topic of young

talent to hundreds of human resources

professionals.

Contact Jerry at

[email protected].

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to take the opportunity

to thank the Human Resources

Professionals’ Association, Canada’s

premiere HR organization, with 20,000

members. They organize the HRPA

Annual Conference and gave Jerry

Zhang the chance to speak about young

talent to top HR professionals in both

2014 and 2015. Also, we would like to

thank Deta Constantine, somebody who

has enthusiastically supported Jerry as

a speaker and thought leader.

mailto:[email protected]

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