The first presentation I attended at TMRE was about the "Millennial Generation," which is made up of people born between 1982 and 2004, and is a growing segment in today's workforce. Being a "Millennial" myself, I was especially interested to attend and learn about what traits/attributes make up this group.Dan Coates, President of Ypulse explained that this generation holistically possesses the following traits:- Special- Sheltered- Confident- Team-oriented- Conventional- Pressured- Achieving
Additionally, the members of this group strive to have a job they are passionate about, instead of simply having a job for job's sake, and seek to "change the world."
This group is the perfect target for Teach For America (TFA), who heavily focuses its recruiting efforts on targeting these "Millennials" who are passionate about making an impact. In order to effectively target this group and recruit the right candidates, Michael Lewis, Senior Managing Director at TFA, said he knew they needed to uncover what truly drives this group.
With the help of Ypulse, they surveyed over 3,000 millennials and came up with 6 different "Millennial" segments. However, not all of these 6 segments proved to be the "ideal" targets for TFA. They had to dig a little deeper to figure out which of these segments were directly applicable to TFA's values. For example, ideal candidates are those who have respect for teachers and believe they can make a difference. Once they filtered for those unique aspects, they narrowed it down to 3 target segments that they felt would make for the best applicants.
Once all of that was said and done, it was important for TFA to ensure that they had indeed selected the proper target segments, so they surveyed incoming applicants to confirm their findings. It turned out that a whopping 97% of the applicants fell into those 3 target segments, which means that TFA is definitely on the right path. :)
Mayuri Joshi isResearch Magician at April Bell Research Group, a boutique, full-service marketing research firm, committed to delivering fresh insights you can act on! Learn more at aprilbellresearch.com.