Since publishing When Millennials Take Over, we’ve been consistently approached by people wanting us to answer a central question: how do we attract Millennials? Whether it’s about attracting customers or the best employees, we see a definite sense of nervousness among leaders that they just aren’t doing it right when it comes to Millennials, so they want to know what they should be doing. How do we retain our Millennial employees? How do we get young people to buy our products, come to our events, or volunteer for our committees?

These questions come from a legitimate need, but they are all misguided in the same way: they assume this is a traditional marketing challenge. In traditional marketing, you devise ways to get people’s attention and then deliver messages that convince them to buy, join, apply, etc. That’s still relevant in today’s world, but remember, this is also a world of ubiquitous information, so your messaging, while still having an impact, doesn’t carry the weight it used to. They will see beyond your messaging. In fact, they expect to. They will see the whole you as an organization.

So if you want to attract Millennials, you need more than good messaging. You need to BE an organization that makes sense to them.

Drawing on our book research, we have developed the Workplace Genome culture assessment. It’s an assessment that will help you to create an organization that is compatible with Millennials.

The Millennials are the largest generation in our history. They will become the largest segment of the workforce, and they will become the dominant consumer group. That is inevitable. What’s NOT inevitable is your relevance to them.

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