The Surprising Strategy Bridging The Gap Between HR And Gen Z

• Building a connection with members of Gen Z is foreign to many, including most HR professionals in charge of bringing the new generation of workers into the labor market. 
• HR professionals can use the attention-grabbing nature of TikTok in conjunction with one of the most robust algorithms imaginable to reach younger candidates.
• Using TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, HR departments can reach out to existing creators who are making content that aligns with their brand to work together to make targeted advertisements and other marketing initiatives.

Connecting with members of younger generations is a historically difficult task, but connecting with Generation Z employees is an issue that HR departments have been struggling with since they entered the workforce en masse in 2018-2019.

Gen Z was the first generation to grow up surrounded by widespread internet access and was younger than any other workers when the pandemic started wreaking havoc on the labor market.

Unsurprisingly, unfettered internet access and, years later a global pandemic, led to ubiquitous feelings of disillusionment and a lack of motivation across the generation. According to the BBC, generation Z experiences burnout more than any other age group.

Finding a way to bring these individuals to the workforce has proven difficult, but this is likely because HR departments are quick to try and force the younger generation to adapt to existing onboarding processes rather than meet them halfway.

What does meeting them halfway look like?

Often, it’s as simple as using their preferred applications and platforms — like TikTok — to connect over content instead forcing the traditional recruiting process.

With TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, HR departments can better connect with the younger generation. Then, once this connection has been established, department heads can work with younger employees on content creation and apply these lessons to other aspects of their existing operations.

Connecting with influencers through TikTok’s Creator Marketplace

Launched in 2019, TikTok’s Creator Marketplace was designed to better connect brands with applicable content creators.

With the Creator Marketplace, HR departments can reach out to existing creators who are making content that aligns with their brand to work together to make targeted advertisements and other marketing initiatives. The benefit is that these influencers already know how to reach the target audience because they’re already making content for them.

This route uses TikTok itself as an onboarding tool. By minimizing the time spent in meeting rooms and listening to long-form employee handbook sections, you can better prepare Gen Zers for their duties without relying on antiquated techniques.

When it comes to finding the right influencer, the Creator Marketplace provides you with a detailed view of each content creator. The data includes video performance trends, audience demographics, data on how they’ve performed with other brands, and other, broader core metrics.

Access to this information allows companies to pick influencers that they’re confident will perform well — those that are already interacting with the individuals the recruiter hopes to reach. All that’s necessary before using the Creator Marketplace is knowing what the goal the content will have.

Creating content that Generation Z can identify with

Using TikTok’s Creator Marketplace is an excellent way to begin bridging the generational gap, but in a perfect world, your HR department would fundamentally understand how to connect with these individuals without outside help.

Millennials may have grown up adjacent to the internet, but Gen Zers are the first age group to grow up surrounded by it. Unsurprisingly, this has created a divide in the way they expect to be communicated with vs. the way we communicate with them naturally.

Instead of trying to teach your existing HR department how to communicate with Gen Z, it would benefit your company to hire younger workers who are already entrenched in internet culture.

TikTok’s few-second to 3-minute video length allows HR departments to have serious conversations without forcing new workers into outdated onboarding sessions, and who better to help create this content than the demographic it’s designed to reach?

Your HR department may have an individual that’s good at communicating with older generations, and although it will look different, you should think about hiring an individual or a team of individuals that knows how to communicate with the youngest generation.

This will allow you to get more use out of the TikTok Creator Marketplace, will help your company create better onboarding tools, and will even help you better connect with consumers of a similar demographic.

Applying the lessons learned through TikTok conversions to other aspects of your business

According to PEW Research, 87% of American adults below 30 use their smartphones for online shopping. Paired with the 68% of Gen Z that uses TikTok, this creates a unique opportunity for businesses to attract leads, nurture the audience, and convert them to customers in real-time, all without exiting TikTok.

The key here is creating content that Gen Zers are interested in, which is where your younger employees come in.

One lesson companies stand to learn from focusing on TikTok as not only an advertisement platform, but also as an onboarding tool, is the importance of flexibility in a business’s and HR department’s operations.

Rather than trying to mold potential new employees to existing structures and processes, sometimes all it takes is meeting them halfway.