You Have 1 of These 4 Brands

Software is everywhere. It is, as Marc Andreessen pointed out, “eating the world.” What began with the communication and entertainment industries has expanded to include education, finance, national defense, and healthcare. Powerful software and the people that build it are now determining factors in the success of all major industries.

Today, a huge percentage of the people capable of building such software are millennials with a technical background. Employers need to create a brand and culture specifically geared toward hiring millennial tech talent in order to stay competitive. This can be a major departure from the norm in terms of culture, messaging, and brand.

We at Looksharp talk to a huge number of employers tasked with recruiting top technical talent that do not have the brands to compete effectively. Where do they start?

Employers tend to fall into four major categories, each with their own unique set of challenges and opportunities for differentiation.

Group #1: Companies with the right brand for the right talent: Think Basecamp. Its brand (innovative tech company) fits its hiring need (innovative tech talent). Its culture is open — something engineers value. The problems it gives new hires are interesting and dynamic.

If you’re in this bucket, nice work! If not, don’t worry; you don’t need to be a tech company in order to compete. Which brings us to the second group.

Group #2: Companies with the right brand for the wrong talent: This group is comprised of big non-tech companies that now need tech talent so they don’t end up like Borders. They have significant employment brand recognition, sure, but not for millennial tech talent.

Let’s look at Walmart. In 2011, the retail giant did roughly $6 billion in business, less than 2 percent of which came from online sales. The year before, Amazon crushed Walmart with $35 billion in online retain revenue.

Walmart knew it needed to create a culture that would attract engineering talent so in 2011, it acquired Kosmix. At the time, Kosmix was a search engine startup. Like Google, its algorithm crawled the web looking for content related to a user’s search terms. Unlike Google, however, it was able to return content related to that user’s search, even if it didn’t contain the specific search term.

Walmart recognized the value this could have when applied to online retail.

From the start, Walmart let Kosmix run like a startup. The new Walmart accelerator program (renamed @WalmartLabs) gave engineers “the freedom to experiment in small teams on far-flung new ideas.” This internal culture was relayed to other engineers in the tech community, thereby attracting more talent.

Today, @WalmartLabs is an established brand in the engineering world. It has transformed Walmart from being viewed solely a retail company to a place where engineers, specifically millennials, can grow and thrive.

Group #3: Companies without a millennial brand in any category: These are companies that do not have millennial-friendly brands, especially for technical talent. Maybe they’re known as old school, maybe no one thinks they’re “cool.” The bottom line is, they have a hard time resonating with the right audience.

Intuit had this problem until it revamped its entire internal structure to make it more flexible for engineers to push code and run tests on the site. This fast-paced development is extremely popular in the engineering world and makes it easier for their recruiters to pitch them as an engineering-friendly company.

Group #4: Companies with no brand (yet!): These are primarily small employers with little-to-no brand recognition. This blank slate can work in their favor because they don’t have to rebrand themselves like Walmart or Intuit. It can work against them because millennial engineers don’t know who they are.

The first step to solving this problem is to focus on what millennials care most about: professional development and mentorship. In our 2014 State of the Intern report we found 67.4 percent of students ranked “ability for long-term advancement” above every other factor, in terms of determining their careers.

If small employers can authentically communicate that career advancement, learning, and access to management , they’re one step ahead of their larger competitors.

Winning top millennial tech talent isn’t just a game for tech companies. Employers in every industry need to compete, and they need to address their unique set problems to do so effectively.

In order to win millennial tech talent, employers need a brand and culture that speaks to the environment and opportunities this talent craves.