Fast Company has an entertaining article written by a CEO of a company that employs almost all Millennials. The article is well worth the read, but let me give you a taste of it:
Lazy. Entitled. Fickle. Freighted with their own inscrutable agendas. These are the kinds of things people say about cats — and millennials. For today’s managers, the generation born after 1980 is a favorite punching bag.
It’s not hard to see why, given that they’re the generation of Lindsay Lohan, Jersey Shore, and flip-flops as appropriate office footwear.
I have been drawn in by these exact topics and I’m an Xer. But further on in the article comes this dandy (emphasis mine):
Millennials don’t have traditional boundaries or an old-fashioned sense of privacy. They live out loud, sharing details of their lives with thousands of other people. Of course there are the obvious risks to this — say, that unflattering, reputation-damaging photo that should have been deleted from Facebook — but while you shake your cane at them for indulging in TMI, I see their openness as a great opportunity. For instance, when our summer intern @jimmyaungchen tweets and Facebooks about something he achieved at work, that’s free marketing for Do Something to the 1,500 people in his immediate network. I now ask job applicants how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers they have.
Excellent point. In fact, I just did some network checking of a sales candidate for one of our customers earlier today. I like that she asks the candidate directly. I prefer to check on my own and it is mainly LinkedIn that I peruse. Facebook is fine, but it is definitely closer to the social/personal side in comparison to LinkedIn.
An entertaining and informative article for sure. It is rare to find this combination so I strongly encourage you to read the entire thing.