Dive Brief:

• Chief human resources officers from Fortune 500 employers such as Macy’s and Verizon gave Forbes their views on how to best engage millennials - a key challenge both now and in the future for employers.

• The CHROs responsible for management and strategy behind global workforces rely heavily on retaining and engaging Millennial talent - no matter if those younger workers primarily interact with customers or work “behind the scenes” engineering the future, according to Forbes.

• While millennials have recently become the largest part of the U.S. workforce and are poised to be the most influential consumer group by 2018, employers can no longer just pay lip service to making the workplace millennial friendly, Forbes reports.

Dive Insight

For example, Bill Allen, CHRO at Macy’s, said one strategy the large retailer deploys is encouraging leaders to behave in a more inclusive way. He told Forbes that Macy's looks to ensure intergenerational understanding - from Millennials to Gen X’ers, Boomers, and even Silent generation employees still in the workplace. Each new generation brings vastly different approaches to work, Allen said, and as a company, Macy’s value proposition to employees has to adapt to these various demographic groups.

Claudia Healy, vice president of Global Talent Acquisition & Development at Verizon, told Forbes that being "credible and transparent" means millennials can be part of something bigger than themselves - an important factor in choosing a career for that group.

“Millennials want to have it fast, want to have it now, in a language that resonates with them,” she said, adding that "Millennials are the 'on demand' generation with the world’s library of information, services and connectivity at their fingertips, with no recollection of a world where such access didn’t exist."