Employers are realizing that putting total control of retirement decisions in the hands of their employees was a bad idea.  Older employees are delaying retirement due to underfunding of their retirement portfolios and market volatility.  The end results are increased healthcare costs for companies to support an aging employee population and decreased upward mobility for younger employees.  Many employers have taken steps to solve the underfunding problem for future generations of retirees through auto-enrollment and auto-escalation in defined contribution plans.   However, they have been unable to solve a continually nagging problem.  How do they retain their millennial employees?

Human Resources leaders now have a new secret weapon for solving the millennial employee retention issue.  The $1.2 trillion of outstanding student debt new hires are facing.  According to a recent article publishing in the Wall Street Journal, 70% of seniors took out loans for their education and are carrying an average of over $37,000 in student debt.  More and more companies such as Fidelity, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and SunTrust are launching employee debt assistance programs, in response to the record amount of student debt new employees will have accrued by the time they enter the workforce.   

If you’re looking to make a change in the way your company operates, maybe you need to change your hiring process. Seek out the job seekers that are doing creative things to get noticed. Their fresh ideas likely don’t end once they accept your job offer. They’ll bring innovative, out of the box ideas to the job, so go ahead and respond to that girl who sent over a box of candy bars wrapped in her resume, or call the guy who announced that he’s searching for a job on a billboard. Take the risk and soak in the reward.  

As a recruiter we know you spend countless hours sitting in front of a screen with what seems like a thousand tabs up, scouring the internet for the perfect candidate. But sometimes, you need to do something different. And who knows it could pay off big.

We often hear from job seekers who are frustrated with traditional job search tactics and feel the need to take the road less traveled to stand out. We’ve heard about a lot of interesting gimmicks, like the girl who wanted to work at Airbnb so she built a webpage to highlight her resume to mimic an Airbnb posting, or someone else who created wrappers for chocolate bars with her resume in place of the nutrition label, or Daniel Seibert who just this week put up a billboard to advertise that he is looking for a career.

Bad news. It seems to be everywhere these days. At home and abroad, there are no shortage of scary, horrifying, discouraging stories.

With all this negativity swirling around, it’s easy to get distracted and have trouble focusing on everyday things – like your job. Even if you’re the most passionate recruiter around, hiring the right person might seem sort of inconsequential compared with the big, bad problems facing the world.

However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. As the saying goes, if you want things to change, you have to start in your own backyard.

So here are 3 ways to focus on recruiting in a world gone mad, and maybe even make a difference in the process.

While their fellow Millennials have been in the workforce for some time, younger Millennials are just graduating college and beginning their careers right now. So, what are they looking for in a job? It’s easy if you just put yourself in their shoes.

[Excerpted from Social Hire]

The gig economy in the U.S. has grown rapidly in recent years, with more workers taking on freelance, independent contractor and other non-traditional jobs. Within this new landscape exists a growing number of opportunities with on-demand companies, such as driving for Uber or performing jobs through TaskRabbit. With the freedom to act as your own boss and work flexible hours, you’d think people would be jumping to pursue these non-traditional employment opportunities. Most people, however, continue to prefer the stability of traditional jobs.