Best Companies for Leaders

Deloitte: Building a Future on Millennial Recruits

As a potential pool of future leadership talent, Millennials represent something of a recruiting conundrum. Companies recognize the importance of attracting this new generation of workers, but they struggle to accommodate their needs. Acknowledging this challenge, survey participants cited several areas in need of improvement or change to fit the work/life patterns of this group, including:

Social media interaction
Mobile technology adoption
Flexible working hours and locations
Modified branding and images for recruiting
Rotational assignments with frequent core-focus changes

One organization making headway with this next-generation recruiting effort is professional services giant Deloitte, which reports that Millennials today make up more than 50 percent of their client-facing workforce. Deloitte maintains a dedicated university-relations team of senior partners, principals and directors who work closely with nearly 40 target universities, actively recruiting more than 7,000 graduates each year. These recruits are then funneled into a comprehensive on-boarding program designed to provide Millennials with the skills to accelerate their productivity, beginning with a year-long “Welcome to Deloitte” (W2D) program.

“W2D introduces each new hire to the organization, instills our core beliefs, simulates the feel of working on a client team, teaches network-building skills through our ‘Deloitte People Network’ social networking tool and, later, focuses on professional development in the specific business unit the Millennial joined,” explains Jennifer Steinmann, chief talent officer, who says that more than 17,000 new professionals participated in W2D in 2012. “The emphasis is on interactive experiences, including simulations, role-plays, small-group teams—even video games—and an online ‘New Hire Center’ with a custom dashboard to track required first-year tasks.”

Deloitte also embraces social media. “Yammer is our platform of choice, with hundreds of active blogging groups forming in its first year alone,” says Steinmann. “Our people use Yammer to ‘crowd-source’ information from colleagues around the world. Professionals can also create forums to exchange information and match mentors with mentees.”

The effort seems to be paying off. In a satisfaction survey of these new hires, 97 percent of the respondents reported they felt welcomed to Deloitte, 96 percent felt they had an understanding of its culture and 96 percent reported being satisfied with their decisions to join the organization.