How Millennials Could Boost Your Business

Millennials have a bad reputation for apathy and the older generations look down on their work ethic. If you own a company, though, you owe it to yourself to hire Millennials. They will take your company forward.
A recent study by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and YEC actually proved that Millennials are highly ambitious and want to progress. They also have the kind of social media awareness that will help your business reach a new global market and join the conversation online; social listening is an invaluable tool for any business!
Simply hiring an employee with an active Facebook presence can increase your company’s digital reach as your own employees can get involved in Liking, sharing and Retweeting your social media posts. Millennials inevitably have their finger on the pulse, and could know of social networks that the CEO of your company will never have even heard of. Luckily for you, they know their Snapchats from their Pinterest, and also know exactly how to leverage them for sales, brand awareness and more.
Even the act of sharing their daily life with friends can have a significant impact on your business, exposing your company to their personal networks. The smartest bosses will harness their natural affinity for social networks and find a way to put the Millennials in charge of social media output.
Content marketing, social shares and viral content will come naturally to Generation Y because they have so much inherent experience with social media. If they hit an obstacle, they know their way around the internet so well that they can find answers within seconds that could have an older worker baffled for hours. Millennials are considered to be self-sufficient and most can self-diagnose problems in the workplace; they can even fix simple issues like IT problems with the help of Google.
They know their way around smart devices and apps, and will almost certainly be able to save you time and money across the whole company with a few simple tweaks to your processes. Use that to your advantage; a tech savvy Millennial will almost certainly pay back their salary in new ideas.
In addition, Generation Y grew up in an era of social media, debate and crowdsourcing. That means they are more likely to build better teams that are based on competence. They’ll probably have the workplace Facebook page up and running in their first week, and be planning a team building barbecue…
While older workers are driven mainly by salary,  72% of Millennials claimed job satisfaction is more important than money. Of course the best workers will still want a salary that reflects their efforts, but Millennials tend to be less materialistic. If they find a workplace that nurtures them and provides the opportunities to progress, their salary will be less of a sticking point. By giving these young workers the opportunity to develop their skills and progress in their roles, your business will provide them with invaluable abilities to take with them into their career maturity.
With 34% of Gen Y job seekers holding a University degree, most are considered to be well educated, too. With so many holding a degree that means you can, potentially, raise the bar of entry for your entry-level employees and have highly-educated youngsters bringing energy and drive to any position.
Generation Y has attracted a fair amount of negative publicity for apathy, a sense of entitlement and spending as much time on their smartphones as they do at their desk, The perks of hiring Generation Y as mentioned above could be seen as a direct result of heavy smartphone usage, though, and some of the criticism is simply unjustified.
There are downsides that you have to manage as an employer with every generation in any case, but the positives of hiring Millennials can more than outweigh the negatives if you do. Honestly speaking, you won’t have a choice soon in any case. According to UNC’s study, by 2020 46% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials.
It’s clear that Millennials could be the key to your business social media strategy, but how do you monetize that platform? Find out more in this blog post about social selling.