Here’s How to Make Your Hiring Ad Eye-Catching to Millennials

Boy have I got a hiring update for you…

Hey! Ron Ramsden here. I am a DYB Coach and a painting contractor in Massachusetts.

Hiring! Hiring! Hiring!

Everybody is talking about it but nobody can find help…

We are not alone, whether in the painting field or trades.

There are two numbers that I want you to think about; 62 and 54.

62% of small business are struggling to find candidates to work; that is 6 out of every 10 small businesses out there which are struggling to fill an open position.

54% of those that are struggling to find people, have no candidates which shows you all those open spots available.

Let’s go over a few things about hiring. I want to dig into what I found out and maybe this will help you along.

The reason why we don’t have any candidate is because everybody is leaving the field, not everybody, but there is a good portion leaving the field.

Some of the reasons why people are leaving are mentioned below.

Retirement: Obviously retirement is one of them. We all retire or we die, one of the two, right?

Painters don’t retire, we kind of just go a little slower and then die.

The job just isn’t cool: Can you make your job cool or fun?

Is it incentivizing to make a job cool?

The job’s not cool, that’s why nobody is jumping into becoming a painter.

Loss of curriculum in the vocational school: Just recently, I went to a job fair at a local vocational school.

They didn’t have a painting department or any painting courses.

I was able to talk to a few of the kids. I had a table there, just in case you want to know, I brought some paraphernalia and I brought some tools.

I also brought some sprayers so the kids could play with them.

I talked to a lot of students there but there wasn’t really an overwhelming interest and what I was really surprised of was actually the other trade organizations and the unions were there.

It’s pretty hard to be an independent painting contractor going against the carpentry union and the electrical union with their paying these days, plus the retirement and everything else.

It just shows you that the job’s so hard to fill that they are actually visiting trade schools to get the kids.

Family business: People aren’t coming into family businesses the way they do in the trade’s organization.

The school, they push for so long now that the kids have opportunities to go to college.

They are looking at Dads out there, working, sweating and coming home with paint in their hands, and for them, it’s not a fun, cool thing to do.

We have to change the way that “being a painting contractor” is viewed, and I’ll tell you how we can do that.

Remember that 54%?

There’s no candidate out there and we are going to try to change this a little bit, maybe a couple of little hints here, maybe It will help you along when you are next hiring.

What I’ve found is called “The Maker Movement”.

What is The Maker Movement?

It’s a millennial movement, which came to terms in 2015 through a magazine.

The Maker Movement can be explained as an Umbrella term for Independent artisans, designers, inventors, tinkerers etc.

Why do we think that? Because we all sum up the millennials as they are lazy, they don’t want to work, they don’t want to sweat.

Think about this one thing, the only reason they are like that is because we let them get like that.

If you have a kid who doesn’t work or you allowed him not to work.

You allowed him to sit in front of a computer or Xbox all day.

We often forget about that because we are workers.

A lot of our friends didn’t need jobs, parents took care of them, maybe they went to the beach for the summer.

It was similar but different from then and now, that was about 30-40 years ago for me.

We have kids right now who have all grown up with a computer in front of them.

They don’t know any different. They don’t know what a phone attached to a wall was, that when it rang, you ran to the wall.

If the doorbell rang, you ran to the door to greet whoever is there.

Now if the doorbell rings, we all panic because we don’t know who’s there or if someone is trying to sell something.

It’s a whole different world now, so remember that the jobs from before and the jobs now have changed.

The kids now, they design their own software online.

They are building their own games, not everyone, but there’s a good portion of them out there who are tinkering online with that.

They build robots. These kids are highly skilled, maybe the ideas came from a Legos and Erector sets.

You can actually go to YouTube and just look at some of the robots that they are building and the competitions they have.

3D printing, what was just wild imagination years ago, now the kids have them on their desk and they can actually build things and design them right there on the desk.

These kids have creativity in their working.

A couple other things you are going to see a little more down the road is a local movement.

They are not into the Walmarts of the world or the Big-box stores, they are local.

They are more local-driven, which means cafes, local food shops pop-up more often.

We’ve all heard of the Craft-Beer Movement.

The millennials are really into the craft beer, that’s why you see so many of them popping up in every city in the United States.

It seems it has one or two or multiple craft. They like local stuff, they like things that are being made.

They are making things, they are working with their hands.

Furniture: You might have seen a big shift in this field. The trends are now furniture being built by the ones.

What do I mean by hand-crafted furniture? You are going to see an upswing in that, and you’ll also notice that you have craftsmen working.

You’ll see people learning a new skill, or honing their skills.

Clothes: It’s really interesting and I didn’t even realize this that how many people actually make their own clothes.

I am used to going to wherever I go to pick up a pair of jeans or a shirt obviously.

I just call a guy up and print them for me, but you know, it’s amazing after talking to my wife and some of the women that she hangs around with, that their daughters are actually making their own clothes.

Let’s look at this and the reason I say this is, it’s the very hands-on kind of thing to do, that means people are still working.

A couple of things we want to do now is to shift our ads and our postings.

Looking for new workers and new hires to that movement and that movement would be “Craftsmen”.

On the next ad, DON’T put “Painter Wanted”.

Put “a craftsman wanted”, “painter craftsman”, “craftsman-in-training”, “apprentice painter”, “apprentice craftsman”, “artisan”.

These are the ones you want to look at. They are looking for more as being a painter, they want to hone their craft.

If we start shifting to that as the craftsmen, the apprentices, the artisans, you will get a little more interest and you are also going to be different than everybody else in your next posting.

Where do you post? Do you post on Craigslist? Facebook? There are so many out there.

I know the popular ones are the ones I mentioned right there, but try shifting the titles of your hiring ads to include some of those; the artisans, the craftsman, and the apprentice.

You might be surprised that you actually have a little more interest right now, directly, just for someone seeing that ad.

These millennials are the workforce.

There are 1 out of every 3 people out there in the workforce and in the next few years, they are going to take over the majority of the actual people working for us.

Remember the numbers! The numbers are scary, but if we shift our attitude towards that and hone in on the people who are actually working, you’ll see great results.

When we were kids someone said it about us, and remember we brought up these kids.

We brought them up to be like this. Let’s hone in on the kids who want to work and not make a general assumption that none of them want to work because there are kids who are out there working.

I am Ron Ramsden and if you’d like to talk to me, you can reach me at ron@dybcoach.com

I’d love to talk to you on Facebook, you can send me a message there.

You can also pick up the phone and have a chat with me.

I am not only a painter, I am also a coach with DYB. I look forward to talking to you.

Have a great day and good luck hiring out there.

Take care!