How to Find the Best Millennial Employees for your Next Event

Millennials are expected to make up nearly 50% of the workforce by 2020. It’s critical to take into account who these millennials actually are, what drives them, how to motivate them, and how to utilize the value that they bring into your event business.

The success of any event is based largely on your staff; how well they interact with the audience, how they engage the guests, how they represent the brand and the company, and how professionally they do the job. The right millennial staff can make – or break – your event.

You don’t need an entire HR department to find you the right event staff. You do need to find the right set of skills in the right set of people, whether they are part of your on-call, contract or remote event staff team.

You need to ask yourself, how and where do you find the best millennial employees for your next event?

Get descriptive
You get what you put out there, whatever it is you are broadcasting – and the same is true for the way and method you describe your ideal employee and the way you highlight your event.
You’re looking for a specific set of skills? The right personality type? A colorful experience?
Write it out – and write it out clearly. Create clear job guidelines, work expectations, define ethics and skills for the job, and add a vibrant employee description.
You may be looking for different shifts and different types of jobs – bar staff, wait staff, hostesses, greeters, ticket scanners, cleaners – so give each one the description that it deserves.
The more descriptive you are about the job, the company, and the event, the higher the quality of the staff you’ll attract. Millennials are drawn to the experience, the brand name, company culture, and most of all, transparency – so even if it is a one time event, you’ll want to describe it in the most attractive and honest way you can.

Flexibility vs. Stability
If you want to attract millennials, the number one thing that needs to be offered is flexibility – or so you would think.
As important as flexibility is, whether it’s flexible hours, shift trades, or pay, stability comes into play as a much more significant factor amongst millennials than assumed.
You’ll want to avoid instability while promoting flexibility. Last-minute schedules, unstable hours, unpredictable payrolls, and error-ridden timesheets can give you, your company, or your event a bad name and chase off some great potential staff.

Yes, make it personal
And by making it personal, we mean getting personally involved in the hiring process and putting a face to the name. You wouldn’t hire a permanent or part-time member of your team without first interviewing them, right? So why would you hire event staff without a more personal hiring process like an interview or updated CV?
You can create online applications and ask for recommendations, prior work experience, and CVs, or even a 1 minute video so that your event staff applicant is not just a story told on paper.
By taking the application process down a more personalized and professional route, not only will that help you really filter out the best of the millennial applicants, but you’ll be receiving more serious staff applicants in the first place.

It’s not about the money… but sometimes it is
You’re looking for high quality millennial staff to work your event – and for high quality, you have to pay in accordance.
It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be an arm and a leg, but the quality of the event staff you hire will definitely be in direct correlation with the amount of money you are offering.
Although millennials can also be motivated by goals other than cash, and it may seem like a good idea at first to look for staff in places like Craigslist where you can save money, setting fair salary expectations will almost certainly help you form a professional team that meets or exceeds your expectations.

Making a timely decision
You want to avoid snap decisions, especially when it comes to hiring someone – but you also don’t want to take too long.
By delaying the decision and hiring process, generally top staff will become unavailable due to conflicting work or personal schedules. Millennials are adept at filling their schedules – so if it’s not with your event, it will be with someone else’s.

The classic route
Posting on job sites has always been a practical and classic approach, not far from posting an ad in the newspaper. It’s basically putting out a “help wanted” ad on a website.
Although this may not be the best way to get to the millennial staff that you are looking for, these websites definitely simplify the process by attracting users who are on the lookout for work.

Get social
Using different platforms of social media to reach your target audience is not only a great tool for promoting your event but for getting the attention of those millennial workers that you are looking for.
Millennials have conquered these platforms and know them inside and out. They spend chunks of hours each day online socializing and consuming information through these platforms.
Publish descriptive job posts that will draw in millennial applicants, and engaging enough so that they can be shared across the network. These channels are perfect for finding your perfect millennial event staff.

Embrace mobile
What sets millennials apart from other groups is their adeptness with technology. Go one step further than Facebook and Instagram and start using apps like LinkedIn Recruiter to get more applicants or Ubeya to hire and book staff through your mobile app.
Millennials mastered the technology field and understand that anything today can be automated and optimized through a software or mobile app. Embrace that and you will reach the circles in which they are drifting.

One with the tech
Millennials are looking for employers and companies who are actively employing technology. Don’t lose your competitive edge.
Event software tools are a huge asset to any event company. From collaborative floorplan design and virtual walkthroughs to ticketing, seating, guest attendance, event and staff management, event technology tools definitely make your life a whole lot easier while helping your millennial staff do their work more efficiently. They’ll appreciate you for it.

Outsourcing from the professionals
They know what they’re doing. It’s their job, just like the event is your job.
There are countless of top-notch staffing agencies that are able to provide temporary and hourly staff for events and gigs.
The perks of outsourcing? The work is done for you – you don’t need to spend time, money and effort on looking for the right staff, dealing with last minute cancellations and replacements.
Like anything, this does come with downsides. Hiring through staffing agencies tends to get pricey, and you don’t always see who you’re getting before you get them.

There is no price on recommendations
You’ve got friends, business contacts and colleagues working in the industry. Reach out to your peers for referrals!
Employees that already come recommended often result in the best candidates for event staff hire. These millennials have already worked events in the past and come a stamp of approval from someone you know.

Valuable Millennial Staffing Webinar
And once you find the best millennial employees for your event business, tune in to this webinar from Ubeya to learn how to manage millennial staff!

In this how to manage millennial staff webinar, learn how to master your workforce management skills when working with millennial staff. Topics covered include keeping HR management up to date, understanding who your millennial staff is and how to find them, information on temp staffing in the event industry, and how to maintain a positive personal relationship with your staff.

This article was written by Leor Bareli, marketing manager at Ubeya, an end-to-end platform for employee management, hiring, scheduling, time sheet, payroll and everything in between.