I saw this on LinkedIn and through it was fascinating:
Continue ReadingDoes Job Jumping Matter Anymore?
I would answer no. I have the opportunity to look at many resumes on any given day and there is a definite sea-change in the job jumping area. Millennials are far less loyal to their employers than any generation before them. In fact, I would say “job” jumping isn’t accurate, they are actually “skill” jumping. These employees are often looking for personal skill development and once they sense they have tapped out their growth curve in their current role, they leave. I spend a fair amount of time explaining this skill jumping behavior to old-school hiring managers. Companies must have a plan for ongoing development of their Millennial workforce otherwise… Read More
Continue ReadingBashing Millennials
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… Read More
Continue ReadingThose Millennial Misfits
The Herman Trend Alert touches on the ever-popular Gen Y/Millennial trends and traits in their most recent email (sorry, no link). The perception of this generation still needs some improvement…drastic improvement (emphasis mine): Recently JobFox.com conducted a poll of recruiters with predictable results—Millennials were judged to be the least effective performers of the four generations now in our workplace. A paltry 20 percent of the responders characterized them as “generally great performers”. Compare this statistic to the 63 percent who said Baby Boomers (43 to 62 years old) were great performers and 58 percent who gave high marks to Gen Xers (29 to 42). True confession – I have a… Read More
Continue ReadingGen Xodus
BusinessWeek.com has an article titled Today’s Top 10 Talent-Management Challenges that provides some interesting tidbits from 3 different talent managers. One topic leaped off the screen: 6. Stemming the exodus of Gen X’ers from corporate life. A big threat in many firms today is the exodus of mid-career talent—people in whom the organization has invested heavily and in whom it has pinned it hopes for future leadership. For example, developing talent management practices and programs calibrated to leverage technology and create greater work/life balance has been a priority for Mercer over recent years. The sheer smallness of my generation creates pockets of problems with the marketplace. This particular problem is… Read More
Continue ReadingMarketing To Millennials
Inc.com chronicles one Gen Y marketing campaign by BMW that I have not heard of. The opening sentence forewarned me: Generation Y’s indifference to traditional forms of marketing and advertising has some big companies and their ad agencies scrambling for creative ways to reach and engage this demographic. Engagement is the key these days, isn’t it? If you read the marketing campaign in the short article, you won’t read about magazine ads, TV commercials or radio spots. Instead there are short films on YouTube, Facebook pages and micro-websites. I think the author best sums up this new marketing approach (my bold): It seems to me that the campaign is less… Read More
Continue ReadingGenerations 101
The Wall Street Journal provides an article that does a nice job of laying out the upcoming shortage of workers. The focus is upon the different generations and the general drive behind each. The article is rather rudimentary, but it provides a clean view of the problem. First: Americans of childbearing age simply are not producing enough kids to meet the economy’s future need for workers, notably in fast-growing fields such as medicine and engineering. The shortfall is coming largely because the fabled baby boom generation was so huge—75 million Americans born in the 18 years from 1946 to 1964—that no other generation can be expected to match it any… Read More
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