Tuesday September 29th, 2009
Sales: The seamy underbelly of recruiting

The recruitment lifecycle starts with sales.
So why aren't we talking about it? 

Thanks to the mainstreaming of social media, any wingnut with an opinion and a keyboard can set themselves up as a recruiting guru these days.  Google virtually any recruiting lifecycle stage or buzzword and you're guaranteed to turn up hundreds - if not thousands - of blogs, articles, templates, tweets, whitepapers, discussion groups and god knows what else by legions of recruiting 'experts' who've managed to convince everyone they're geniuses simply because they've consistently churned out 5000 words per week.

But there's a yawning gap in all this content, apparently concealed by a Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) field:  Sales.

Go ahead, try Googling.  Google "how to recruit candidates" - you'll get a million articles, tip lists, strategies, etc.  Then try Googling "how to sell recruitment services".  You'll notice there's a distinct lack of op-ed/advice pieces, and the only one even remotely interesting in the first few pages of search returns is 'How Not to Sell Recruitment Services', which is less than helpful.

But none of us (by 'us', I mean those of us who seem to have no shortage of opinions on every other aspect of the recruitment lifecycle, and the time to write about them) would be in a position to talk about recruiting as much as we do if we didn't first have a requisition to fill.  After all, to get a requisition, you must first have a client - and that means that someone, somewhere, had to sell something.

So what's the problem?  Why aren't we talking about recruiting sales?

Great salespeople hate writing
Show me a guy (and sales is male-dominated) who's a sales rockstar and I'll show you a guy whose idea of cruel and unusual punishment is having to write a 500-word blog post. Salespeople like to draw a straight line from 'action' to 'result', and the shorter that line, the better.  The slow build of social media and the murky relationship between "X number of hours spent on the blog" to "$X in revenue" drives them nuts.  So the people most qualified to talk about sales are too busy actually making sales to fart around in the blogosphere.

Great marketing people hate selling
Oh, don't deny it:  We all know that good salespeople - in any industry - can and do make a whole lot more money than any salaried marketing or HR job. And agency recruiters can and do make a lot more money than corporate recruiters.  So why do we stay in marketing, HR and/or corporate recruiting?  Because at the end of the day, we all hate the hard sell - the cold calls, the rejection, the endless client visits - and 

Social media is still in its 'early adopter' phase in terms of business use
For all the mainstream hype about it, social media for business is still very much undiscovered territory, and we're just beginning to establish some benchmarks and best practices around social media for recruiting.  Most of the discussion is around 'theories' of social media.

The type of person most likely to be an avid user of social media for recruiting, therefore, is the type of person who is more interested in writing a whitepaper on, say, the role of grassroots corporate philanthropy on employee engagement than they are on coming up with "10 tips to make your sales team more effective".

HR-types are often reluctant to focus on 'filthy lucre'
While recruiting has a natural affinity with sales - they're both very results- and bottom-line focused - the truth is that HR types often know doodley-squat about sales, and could care less.  So while you may see HR professionals talking/writing about some parts of the recruitment lifecycle, you won't see them focusing on the 'sales' aspect of it.

Talking about 'sales' seems too transactional
We're - those of us making the most noise about social media for recruiting - always droning on about how you have to build long-term, solution-oriented relationships with clients, and that it's not about 'selling' but about 'results', blah blah blah.  

Writing blog posts or articles on highly tactical, transactional stuff like how to get a first meeting with a potential client or how to close a deal almost feels like a betrayal of that mantra - even though it's not.

WHY WE NEED TO START TALKING ABOUT SELLING RECRUITMENT SERVICES

The move to RPO - whether bundled or unbundled - is changing the way recruitment services are sold.  

Organizations are learning that the traditional contingency-fee-based recruiting model just isn't going to cut it any more:  It's too expensive in weak economies and too inefficient in strong ones.  

The contingency model is fairly low-risk for clients (they don't pay til a hire is made), and lends itself well to commoditization (if your fees are 17% while your competitors' are 19%, you're halfway to making the sale), so recruiters haven't had to be particularly sophisticated in their sales strategies.

But asking an organization to turn over some or all of their recruiting process to a third party - and to commit to paying for that service regardless of the number of hires made - is a different kettle of fish altogether.  That kind of selling requires the same long-term relationship-building that we so often talk about around candidates.  It's important to remember that the C in 'CRM' stands for 'Client' as well as 'Candidate'.

Permalink  Comments (2)

Thursday September 24th, 2009
Sure, candidate experience is still more talk than action. You don't change a decades-old paradigm overnight.

So I was reading Sarah White's blog post about how the industry talks a lot about, but doesn't actually deliver, great candidate experiences. 

And she's right:  For all the hundreds (thousands?) of blogs, articles, whitepapers, media features and god knows what else about candidate experience in the past few years, the truth is that most organizations are still woefully inept when it comes to actually delivering anything approaching a 'great' candidate experience.

But I disagree with Sarah when she asserts that the industry doesn't really care about the candidate experience.  I think the industry as a whole does care; it's just that you can't change a decades-old paradigm overnight.

Let's not forget that the whole concept of 'candidate experience' is a relatively recent one.  It wasn't until 2000 that The Cluetrain Manifesto got everyone thinking of relationships with stakeholders as two-way dialogues and that the idea that User Experience should extend beyond website design really took hold.

When I first started focusing on recruitment marketing in late 2004, hardly anyone was talking about candidate experience (or employee experience, for that matter).  Heck, most organizations were still struggling to come to terms with the ways in which the internet was changing the ways in which they were interacting with their customers, and even the term 'social networking' was just beginning to go mainstream.

What's more, the people in a position to transform their organizations - i.e. aged 35+ and in management roles - had just spent most of the past 15 years in a talent market where supply reliably exceeded demand (most of the 1990s sucked, employment-wise; the dot-com bubble years were nice but altogether too short; and by 2004 we were still a little gun-shy thanks to the spectacular dot-bomb flameout of 2001).  

Fifteen years is a long time, so it's not surprising that many organizations simply got in the habit of thinking that job-seekers would always be supplicants at the altars of employers:  There'd always be a plentiful supply of applicants, so why waste resources chasing them?

Of course, by 2005, we were starting to hear rumblings of an impending talent crisis thanks to a huge demographic shift (aging baby boomers + lower birthrates meant that more people would be leaving the workforce than were entering it).  But by the time the talent crisis was really starting to make itself felt in early 2008, we were blindsided by the global financial crisis - and suddenly we were right back to having a surfeit of applicants.

[Yes, I know that some industries have continued to have a chronic talent shortage, recession or no recession.  But I'm speaking in general terms here.]

Given that 

• It's been less than 10 years since the term (and notion of) 'candidate experience' has even been in use
• Only 3-4 of those years have seen a talent market in which demand even begins to exceed supply
• The economic environment of the past 12-18 months has generally obscured the talent shortage engendered by the demographic shift in first-world countries
• For most of the past 60 years, our approach to employment has been about candidates saying "Please, Mr Organization, may I please have a job?" - not the other way around

- is it really any wonder that we're seeing more talk than action when it comes to candidate experience at an organizational level?  Making a commitment to delivering great candidate experiences requires an enormous paradigm shift, a total change in our approach to the relationship between candidates and employers.  That kind of change simply doesn't happen overnight.

I think the wide range of comments on Sarah's post tell their own tale, too:  For every one of us who's passionat- nay, evangelical - about developing, delivering and measuring candidate experience (and I include myself - there's a reason the subtitle of this blog is 'Improving the recruiting experience'), there are others who remain unconvinced.

It's taken years for organizations to get their heads around the idea that successfully managing customer (brand) relationships and great customer experiences in a networked communication model (i.e. one-to-one communications vs the old, one-to-many model) requires an enterprise-wide shift in thinking.  

We're just at the beginning of that shift in terms of candidate and employee experience.  That's why so many discussions of candidate experience focus on specific tactical initiatives - writing better job posts, processes for following up with applicants - rather than enterprise-wide philosophies:  We know that in order to get the rest of the organization on-side, we have to be able to point to short-term successes ("See?  We put a little effort into writing our job postings and it reduced our time-to-hire by 50%!  Imagine what we could do with an organizational commitment to delivering great candidate experiences at every touchpoint...").

It's not that the industry doesn't 'care' about candidate experience; it's just that the average person doesn't really know what it is yet.  Don't forget: Those of us here on ERE - and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and social-media-for-recruiting in general - are the early adopters.  Sure, we've been thinking about, talking about, and writing about candidate experience for a few years now, but we're not all that representative of the average person.  It's just going to take the average person a little while to catch up.

How do I know?  At Head2Head, I've held the title of 'Director, User Experience' since 2005.  The first couple of years, the reaction to that title, even internally, was "Huh?"  But it didn't take long for my co-workers to understand that organizationally, it meant we were committed to delivering "Positive and consistent experiences across all touchpoints, to all stakeholders, that meet or exceed expectations, 100% of the time".  

Today, I hardly ever have to explain the concept to new employees or external recruiting professionals - they already get it, and they understand how it delivers value.  Outside of recruiting, well, I still do a fair amount of evangelizing - but I rarely get the "Huh?" response any more.  So while the industry may not be shifting as fast as we'd like it to, it is shifting.  

I think we have to be careful not to confuse "lack of caring" with "lack of understanding".  The former implies a disconnect, when in fact it's just a function of time and exposure.

Permalink  Comments (2)

Wednesday September 23rd, 2009
Dear Candidate: This is why you didn't get the job

As you know, Mike Stearns, the MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com guy, sent me an email in response to my blog posts about him.  He wasn't particularly happy about the posts, of course - he used words like "angry", "presumptuous", "outlandish and unfair" and capped it with the popular  accusatory "people like you" statement.

48 hours later, the original MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com site turned into a blog, ostensibly so that Mike can capitalize on the traffic his site has generated to create a community of job-seekers.  However, never one to run when he can walk, Mike hasn't yet actually populated the site with any content other than the introductory paragraph.

The whole thing got me thinking.

I initially followed Mike's story because I thought it was kind of interesting - sure, it was a gimmick, but in terms of personal branding, it was a good try.  As time went on and Mike still didn't seem to have a job, I kind of felt sorry for him:  It's gotta suck when you get all kinds of media attention but it doesn't actually deliver the results you want.

But I'm not feeling so sorry for him any more.  And I'm thinking that fellow ERE member Matt Cheek had it right when he wrote "Some people find ways to stay unemployed...." in response to my post.

Do job-seekers like Mike really know how they're sabotaging themselves?  Do they even realize they're doing it?

I suppose the real answers to these questions are more the purview of my sister, the therapist, than me.  For those chronic job-seekers disinclined to months of therapy, however, I offer the following helpful insights:

WHY YOU'RE STILL UNEMPLOYED

1. You're a little delusional about the message you're sending
   One of the most telling comments Mike made in his email to me was "You know nothing of how or why I came up with the idea and set up the site."
   
   Um...what?  Have you seen the homepage of your website?  It says how and why you and your wife came up with the site.   WHY:  "This site was born out of frustration with the job market."  HOW:  "I decided to take matters into my own hands  and help him stand out in a sea of unemployed."  
   
   This defensive disconnect is probably the #1 problem among chronically unsuccessful job-seekers, who seem to think that potential employers should be telepaths or transformational grammarians .  You're right that recruiters and potential employers don't know you:  At the initial contact stage, all they've got to go on are the messages you're sending them (resume, cover letter, website, whatever).  
   
   Which leads us to #2...
2. You're blaming the wrong people
   If, say, Nike makes a tv commercial for running shoes that leaves me with the impression that their shoes are overpriced and unappealing, Nike doesn't blame me for not buying the shoes.  They go back to the drawing board to try to come up with an ad that communicates their message (that their shoes are well-priced and appealing) more effectively.
   
   If your resume - or website, for that matter - is giving your target audience (i.e. recruiters, employers) the wrong impression, stop blaming the target audience.  Go change the message. 
3. You're not being objective about yourself
   Anyone who's ever said "But seriously, do I really look like that?" after seeing a particularly bad photo of themselves knows that achieving true objectivity about oneself is about as attainable as finding the magical ferry boat to Avalon.  
   
   But that's what friends are for:  Get them to take a look at your resume, cover letter - even your interview outfit - and give you some honest feedback.  Then, for good measure, ask someone who doesn't know you for their feedback, too.  There's a reason that advertisers like Nike use focus groups to avoid issues like #2, above.
   
   Sure, even constructive criticism can sting.  But the soothing balm of employment is remarkably effective at taking away the pain.
   
   BONUS TIP:  If one person gives you 'negative' feedback that you don't agree with, you can probably ignore it as the ravings of a madman.  If, on the other hand, 12 people say the same thing, you might want to at leastconsider revising your approach.  
4. You're taking it too personally
   One of the comments Mike made in his email was that I was being "outlandish and unfair" to "judge" him without "ever having met [me]."
   
   Um...what?  As a job-seeker, everything you put out there in the course of your job search - resume, email, voicemail, or, in Mike's case, a website - is an advertisement for you and your services.  Employers and recruiters use these 'advertisements' to make judgements about who to contact for an interview.  In fact, if they weren't  using them to make judgements, there'd be no need for them - because everyone would get an interview. 
   
   BONUS TIP:  You may be surprised to learn that recruiters and hiring managers are not, in fact, soulless evil automatons whose only goal is to make you feel like an unemployable halfwit.  They're just busy.  
    
5. Recruiters are better than dogs at reading non-verbal cues
   Remember the candidate whose nail-biting made recruiters reluctant to present her to the client, even though she was smart, articulate, and well-qualified?
   
   It's not just about the content of your resume or the actual words you say in an interview.  Great recruiters have an almost uncanny ability to make accurate assessments based on little details that may not even occur to you:  Phone the recruiter even though the job ad specifically says 'no phone calls'?  You're demonstrating that you think rules don't apply to you or you can't follow directions.  Screaming baby in the background while you're doing a pre-scheduled phone interview?  You're demonstrating you're not all that interested in the job on offer - because if you were, you'd have found someone to look after the baby for an hour. 

Here's another little thought to leave you with:  Ever noticed that the people you'd most like to be friends with - i.e. the ones who aren't delusional, prone to blaming others, have a sense of humour about themselves, don't take everything so personally, and just have a good 'vibe' about them - are the ones least likely to be unemployed for any length of time?

Just saying.

Permalink  Comments (5)

Tuesday September 22nd, 2009
We're looking for great HR professionals!

Here are just some of the opportunities for HR specialists and generalists we're currently recruiting for:

HR Business Partners:
Education industry, downtown Toronto,up to $80k
Insurance industry, Waterloo, up to $80k

AVP Shared Service
Retail industry
Downtown Toronto
up to $150k

Director of HR
Healthcare business services industry
Niagara-on-the-Lake
up to $120k

Director of Disability and Wellness
Retail industry
Mississauga
up to $75k

Senior HR Consultant
Mechanical/electrical home services industry
Scarborough
up to $75k plus bonus

For more information or to apply for any of these positions, CLICK HERE.

SMARTREWARDS: Refer a friend and you could receive $250!

Learn more about the SmartRewards referral program.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Permalink  Comments (0)

Sunday September 20th, 2009
Follow us on Twitter!

Permalink

Sunday September 20th, 2009
51 new sales jobs!

Permalink

Friday September 18th, 2009
WEBINAR: Twitter 101

FREE WEBINAR: If you've been wondering whether to join the Twitter-for-recruiting bandwagon, this is the webinar for you.

We'll review Twitter basics - how to set up an account, how to tweet, etc. - and real-world recruiting success stories.

Wednesday, September 23
12pm-1pm

To register, CLICK HERE. (Webinar is free but space is limited!)

Permalink

Friday September 18th, 2009
Great networking lasts a lifetime. That's why Facebook is more important to your career than you think.

In a lot of ways, you've been social networking since you were a kid. Facebook helps you leverage those relationships.

Social media has gone mainstream, and the 30+ demographic has stopped dismissing it as 'some fad for the kids' and are ready to start using social media tools a little more enthusiastically. But given that the average 30- or 40-something is in their peak work/family years, the last thing they need is to get sucked into a social media vortex.


Just because it's 'fun' doesn't mean it's not 'productive'

One of the questions I'm often asked is: "Why should I bother with Facebook? What's the point of reconnecting with people I knew in high school and haven't spoken to for years? I mean, it's not like LinkedIn, which can help me with my professional career - right?"

Wrong.

Facebook can be a lot of fun: Anyone who's joined Facebook can recall those first couple of weeks, when you reconnect with your best friend from high school or that guy you had a crush on during frosh week; share photos from summer camp circa 1982; come across a discussion group for some indie band you thought no one else knew about; or even just catch up with former colleagues to see what they're doing now.

The trouble is, for all of Richard Branson's protestations to the contrary, we're taught to think that if something is 'fun', it can't possibly be 'productive', work-wise.

Think again.

Still a 'sphere of influence' - just a different sphere

The #1 piece of advice we give to candidates first entering the workforce is "Network, network, network!" We tell kids who've just graduated to tell everyone they know - friends, family, casual acquaintances they've met at the gym - that they're job-hunting, because we know that ultimately it's a numbers game: The more people who know you're in the market for a new job, the more likely they are to think of you when they hear about a job opportunity.

But that's good advice for all of us at any age or career stage.

Your school friends have grown up into successful people - who'll make great business contacts!

Remember, people tend to move in peer groups: That means that if you're ambitious and successful now, the kids you hung with in high school or university, and the friends you made in your first career jobs in your early 20s, have probably gone on to be successful and ambitious, too. In other words, they're worth knowing for professional reasons.

That's why Facebook can be just as powerful a tool as LinkedIn when it comes to networking - it's all about the way you use it.

[PLEASE NOTE: While Facebook is a great networking tool for most professions, I'm focusing on the value for HR and recruiting professionals here, since if you're reading ERE, you probably work in HR/recruiting.]



Why you should be using Facebook
There are a whole lot of reasons why Facebook can be an excellent professional networking tool. Here are just some of them:

1. The 'fun' value will help you stay motivated
   
   If I had a nickel for every time someone looked guilty and said to me "I know I should be updating my LinkedIn profie more often, but...", I would not need to write this blog, because I'd have been able to purchase a home on Mustique, where I would be right now, blissfully unconcerned with building my personal brand or improving my Google ranking.
   
   About Facebook, on the other hand, people most often look guilty and say "I spent two hours on Facebook yesterday, just kicking around..."
   
   If you're already on Facebook, it's way easy to use it for building your professional profile!
2. Facebook delivers better-quality relationships
   
   Because Facebook facilitates conversations, it's easier to build deeper relationships with people than it is on 'business networking' sites like LinkedIn.
   
   You may have a smaller network on Facebook - in fact, the BBC says that 150 is the ideal number of Facebook friends, though I think for recruiters the number is more like 200-250 - but because you're able to have more meaningful interactions, with more people, on a daily basis, those 200 contacts are likely to deliver more ROI in the long run than 1000+ LinkedIn connections.
   
   Bonus tip: People are always more likely to trust someone they've known since Grade 8 than someone they've met at work, even if they haven't talked to them since high school. So rekindling an old relationship will always be easier than forging a new one.


3. At least 50% of your contacts aren't using LinkedIn
   You know the kids who went to school with who have great careers - and therefore could be great professional contacts - but who have to keep a low profile or tend not to do a whole lot of networking? They're not on LinkedIn - they're on Facebook. If all you use is LinkedIn, you'll miss them.
4. Facebook is a better ice-breaker
   Reach out to that guy from your Grade 10 class who you haven't seen in 15 years but is now the Senior VP of some Fortune 500 through LinkedIn, and he'll either not remember you or figure that you just want something.
   
   Ping him through Facebook with a message like "Hey Bob, heard from Cindy you guys just had a baby - congratulations!", on the other hand, and you've just opened a non-sales-related dialogue - which is, as you know, a crucial building block of any great relationship.
   
   Bonus tip: Facebook's model allows you to leverage your spouse's network, too, because you can see (even just from wall posts) what his/her network is up to.


5. Facebook helps you stay top-of-mind with the people who are most invested in you and your career
   
   Friends and family are the ones most motivated to refer/recommend you. The News Feed - where your friends can see your status updates and other activities - ensures your friends are seeing your name regularly, which increases the chances they'll remember to recommend/refer you.

Well, this turned into a rather longer blog than I had expected - it's long even for me - but I found the more I thought about Facebook, the more I realized that it's been an excellent tool for me over the past couple of years.

Not only has it allowed me to reconnect and stay in more regular touch with friends, family and former co-workers, it's also had demonstrable ROI: It's helped me to build my personal brand; it's helped me to build the Head2Head and RetiredWorker brands; it's helped my friends and family understand more about what I do for a living (which has in turn helped them to recommend/refer me for business stuff); it's helped me learn a lot (from the links, notes and discussions of my friends); it's connected me with great candidates - and most importantly, I've had a lot of fun doing it.

Which begs the question: Can you afford not to be on Facebook?

Permalink  Comments (1)

Friday September 11th, 2009
Remember the MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com guy? He's still looking.

UPDATE September 12: I received an email last night from Mike Stearns regarding my blog posts about him and his site. Needless to say he wasn't best pleased with some of my comments. But as I've said before on several occasions, I think a more open dialogue between recruiters and candidates - with recruiters providing more constructive feedback - would deliver benefits to everyone involved. So I've invited Mike to post his comments here in response to my blog. I hope he does...

ORIGINAL POST:

Regular readers will recall my blog post of July 31 about Mike Stearns, the unemployed MBA grad who was having such a frustrating time with his job search that his wife launched a website called MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com. It was a creative idea and it generated quite a bit of media attention for Mike - but 5 months later he was still unemployed, which begged the question: Are stunts and gimmicks really, in the end, the best way to get a job?

Thanks to the paparazzi culture of the past 5 or 10 years, many of us think there's no such thing as bad PR: If you're getting on Oprah or a page in People, success (and money!) are sure to follow (heck, there are still plenty of people happy to pay Jon and/or Kate Gosselin $25k to show up at a launch party for some new product, even though every time either one of them open their mouths, they reveal themselves to be just as vapid, unkind, and greedy as any Hilton/Kardashian/Jenner in the market).

But when you're looking for a 'serious' job in a 'serious' industry - like Mike, who, with his MBA, probably hoped to get some kind of analyst position at a Big 5 consulting firm - telling Oprah's 11 million viewers that you were so desperate to find a job (and so incapable of finding it yourself) that your wife had to take matters into her own hands, isn't really going to get the attention of serious recruiters at serious companies. Every recruiter I talked to about MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com said, "There must be something wrong with him as a candidate. Otherwise he'd have found a job by now."

So what's wrong with Mike?

Well, here we are in mid-September, and according to Mike's blog (last updated August 19th), he's still unemployed. Only now he's talking about job boards and turning MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com into some kind of website for job-seekers, like a "...sweet spot in there between Craigslist and LinkedIn."

Except...

That blog post tells me everything I need to know about why Mike doesn't have a job yet: He acknowledges up-front that job boards don't work, yet he thinks he'd like to set one up; he recognizes that LinkedIn helps to connect you with people, but obviously hasn't used it to build a proper network, because if he had, he wouldn't still be submitting resumes "into the black hole of corporate HR". He'd be expanding his network (he only has 198 connections - I checked); participating in groups and discussions; and raising his profile so that "corporate HR" would find him, not the other way around.

It also tells me that he hasn't used the past 6+ months to build relationships with recruiters, because if he had, they'd have told him that the world needs another job board/social networking site like a hole in the head, and that it's virtually impossible to monetize a site like that within the first 5 years, even if it does take off.

For me, though, the most telling thing is how infrequently he's updating the site or posting blogs. If you were out of work, but had a website that was getting a fair amount of traction and which had given you the beginnings of a personal brand, wouldn't you be on there every single day, blogging about job-hunting, resume tips, resources for job-seekers, the employment market, and amusing anecdotes about your own job search and interview process? Wouldn't you add a 'comments' section to your blog so that you could engage in dialogue with other job-seekers or even potential employers who came to visit your site?

I don't know why I've got such a bee in my bonnet about this - I mean, did I really need to write two blog posts about this guy? Did you really need to read two blog posts about him?

I think it's bugging me because, as an entrepreneur (RetiredWorker.ca) and consultant, I know the value of national exposure on an Oprah-like scale - I know that it can transform your business and your life, if only you're able to grab the opportunity and run with it. So I guess it's hard for me to see someone receive the golden ticket, but then just sort of put it in his pocket and wander away....

Permalink  Comments (0)

Friday September 4th, 2009
5 Things You Don't Know About Gen Ys. But Should.

First off, the usual writer's apology for a 2-week absence. Not a day goes by that I don't wish for a technological advance that would allow me to dictate blogs from my brain to my computer telepathically. This would make my shower time much more productive, since I currently waste that 7 minutes of my day singing old Mental as Anything songs (from the seminal Creatures of Leisure album, in case you're interested).

I'd probably blog more if I weren't so bloody verbose. Thank you, grade 9 typing!

Anyway.

The other week I was asked to take part in a focus group about a new website aimed at Gen Y-aged job-seekers. (About which I should probably not go into too much detail. They didn't make any of us sign an NDA or anything - though they probably should have - but I'll probably run into the organizers again one day and they won't thank me for giving away all their ideas. Anyway, it's not really important for the purposes of this blog.)

For part of the session, I was alone in a room with 8 or 10 Gen Yers. Some were in their last year of university; some were freshly graduated (a couple had both BAs and MBAs); some were a year or two out of school. All of them were the kind of Type A Overachievers who'd been in student government (probably in high school as well as university); written for the university paper; and started a website and/or a business during school.

(You know, the sort you either hate (because they're just so darn popular and overachieving) or kind of like (because they're The Leaders of Tomorrow and have gobs of charisma) or recognize and feel sympathetic towards (because you yourself were in student government and a frosh leader and worked on the paper and you know just how paper-thin the confidence can be). I'll let you guess where I sit on that continuum.)

I've participated in and facilitated a fair amount of focus groups in my time, and I'll say this about a roomful of Type-A Overachievers: They may drive the wallflowers nuts, but they're good at articulating their thoughts (and they have a lot to say, so you get a lot of their thoughts in an hour).

Like most people in recruitment marketing - and as a Douglas Coupland-raised Gen Xer - I've read a lot about Gen Ys in the past few years (and I've even written about their effect on corporate philanthropy), but this was the first time in a while that I'd seen a group of them up-close and personal, and listened to their answers about what it's like to be entering the workforce or taking the first tentative steps towards a career.

(Now, before you say anything, I'll admit: I know a roomful of overachievers with BAs and MBAs isn't a representative sample of the larger Gen Y workforce. But let's be honest for a second here: When most of us are thinking about/blogging about/talking about recruiting and retaining Gen Ys, aren't we mostly talking about how to get hold of exactly these candidates? The ones with post-secondary educations, who are most likely to be A-list employees in the long-term? And here in Canada, where more than 40% of Gen Ys engage in post-secondary education, it's not like university grads are an elite minority. Though to be honest when I looked up that stat, I was a little surprised - I was sure that the post-secondary education levels were significantly higher than 40%. Weren't you?)

THE SURPRISING THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT GEN Ys:

1. They are desperate for mentors
   These are kids who were friends with their parents in ways that we (Gen X and older) never were. They're used to having an adult they like helping them navigate the world. But now that they're out of school and choosing careers - about which their parents may know nothing and therefore can't help - they're kind of lost for guidance. We aren't reaching out to them because they seem so confident that we think they don't need (or want) us. But they do.
   



2. They're scared to fail
   These are kids whose every word, step, poop and dance recital was applauded, announced, videographed and trumpeted as the Second Coming. Now that they're adults, they're beginning to realize - and accept - that the world isn't going to congratulate them for successfully wearing matching socks. But they have so little experience of failure that they're scared to death of it.
   



3. The peer pressure is brutal
   For those of us who graduated in, say, 1991 with an English degree, just getting a job was enough. The recession had been going on seemingly for ages, we were all working for peanuts at crap jobs, and we really only knew what our own circle of friends was doing, so peer pressure was minimal.
   
   These kids have been hearing stories from older siblings about getting $80k-a-year jobs (which did exist a couple of years ago), the internet gives them access to a huge network of people at their lifestage (some of whom are still snagging great jobs or making huge salaries), and the media has filled their heads with stories of other 22-year-olds who invent some social networking site that they sell 3 years later for $1.9 billion. So when all they see in front of them is a $40k-a-year job as an Assistant-Something, they begin to think that they're the only one their age who's 'sucking'.
   



4. They don't realize that the marketplace has negative stereotypes about them
   When I mentioned that recruiters and employers often think that Gen Ys have a sense of entitlement, don't work beyond 9-to-5, and come into a job expecting to be running the company within a year, there was shocked - and nervous - laughter around the table.
   
   Not only do they not think of themselves this way, they were surprised to learn that potential employers might see them this way. They think of themselves as hard workers who are just waiting for the opportunity to prove themselves - in other words, they think of themselves the way every new-to-the-workforce generation has thought of themselves since the dawn of time.
   



5. In some ways, they're just as green as we ever were
   We tend to believe that this internet generation is more savvy than we were - that they're entering the workforce with more knowledge and confidence or something. And sure, they have more access to information than we ever did: They can find and apply to more jobs (via the internet), they can better prepare for interviews by Googling a potential employer, and the internet is awash in resume templates.
   
   But in some very basic ways, they're still as ignorant as we were: Remember when you didn't know how 'headhunters' worked, or who paid them? Remember when you didn't have a 'network'? Remember thinking, in the first year of your first job, that you hated it but now you were 'stuck' in this career forever? Gen Ys may have a superficial confidence and swagger, but it's often masking #2 and #3, above.
   
   
   Which brings us right back to #1.

You know, I learned something else from the focus group: I learned I kinda liked these kids. (I'm also a bit shocked that I think of them as 'kids', because I clearly remember that at age 22 I totally thought I was a fully-formed adult. And now I can't believe my parents didn't laugh their heads off at some of my 20-something pronouncements about life.)

A couple of them approached me after the focus group to talk about their careers, and said they'd follow up by email or phone - and I hope they do, because I find myself much more interested in helping them start/advance their careers than I used to be.

Permalink  Comments (2)

About the Authors

Paul Dodd
Co-founder and President
Head2Head Canada

Paul has one simple goal: To help companies hire great people - and get the most out of every recruiting dollar they spend. That's why he's recognized as one of the best recruitment-industry thinkers in Canada.

Links

Archives

Tags

Tag Cloud

RSS Feed

RSS Feed