The poor millennials – those born between 1980 and 2000 – get a bad rap for their supposed short attention spans and need for instant gratification, but a leading accountancy firm has found that the only way to stop their young candidates getting frustrated with the recruitment process is to condense it into just one day.

After receiving a lot of negative feedback from applicants, professional services provider KPMG, which specialises in audit, tax and advisory services, decided to radically overhaul its graduate recruitment processes. The company previously carried out three separate assessments over several weeks, but will now do all assessments in one day and let graduates know if they’ve been successful or not in just two working days.

KPMG made the change after conducting a survey of 400 new graduates applying for jobs at the firm over the summer. Over a third said they were frustrated with how long the recruitment process took and how long they had to wait to find out if they had been successful. Over 50% of those surveyed said that they were annoyed at not receiving feedback from the firm if they didn’t get the job.

Other companies are also adapting their graduate recruitment strategies to suit millennials and to respond to feedback. For example, the BBC reports that the US investment bank Goldman Sachs has made the bold decision to scrap face-to-face interviews with candidates in favour of video interviews. The move is aimed at the 2,500 or so students recruited for both summer and full-time positions and will be used in the first-round stage of recruitment in order to find students from a broader range of disciplines.

Explaining the motivations behind the change to Yahoo! Finance, KPMG chair Simon Collins said:

“We are competing with the full gamut for the best brains and talent leaving university: getting our graduate recruitment right is crucial to the long-term success of our business.”

Most businesses would agree that this is an excellent strategy for companies to adopt, especially those in digital, technology, finance and other businesses which rely heavily on innovative and young, bright talent to drive them forward. If something is wrong with your recruitment process, you won’t be able to attract the best talent and may lose them to your competitors.

Getting the balance right

While you may want to consider shortening and streamlining the processes you use to recruit graduates, you must also keep quality control standards high. Making recruitment quicker in order to keep millennial applicants happy is no use if you’re rushing the process and not ending up with the right candidates.

It’s all about striking the perfect balance between speed and thoroughness, which is something that specialist agencies such as SOLOS Consultants have perfected. With lots of experience recruiting graduates for digital, tech and financial roles, SOLOS is able to conduct thorough pre-screening, testing and assessment whilst also making the process as fast, efficient and accurate as possible.

image courtesy of nenetus @freedigitalphotos.net