Corrections or additions?
This article by Kathleen McGinn Spring was prepared for the April 30, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Excerpt: `Generations Collide’
In this excerpt from When Generations Collide, a book
by Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman, who speak at the
first annual Cornerstone New Jersey Weekend on May 2 and May 3 in
Cape May, the authors talk about how easy it is to overlook whole
groups of job candidates, and explain why it is a mistake to do so:
Mining for silver. Companies today are so focused on attractingyoung people that they are ignoring one of their most valuable resources— Traditionalist employees. Traditionalists, the group born priorto 1946, have the skills, qualifications, experience, and maturityorganizations need to retain, and they’re right under our noses. Ratherthan losing them, companies need to springboard them back into thelabor pool long before they all end up poolside in Miami. Unfortunately,in our survey, a surprising 40 percent of Traditionalists disagreedwith the statement “My company does a good job making me wantto stay.”As employers continue to fight the war for talent, they complain constantlyabout the quality of applicants. Yet applicants of quality are rightunder their noses. Traditionalists are ready, willing, and able towork if only we can look past a few gray hairs and see the characteristicsthat truly made them the greatest generation.Traditionalists are the generation that invented the one-page resume.Job-hopping was almost unheard of, and many stayed with the same companytheir whole career. Ralph Thorp, a 71-year-old district representativefor Lutheran Brotherhood, has been with that company 44 years. “WhenI do retire,” he commented, “I want to be sure my customersare taken care of. The company relies on me for that.” How manywould kill to have Ralph’s attitude rub off on their employees?In times of rapid change, these seasoned workers can provide muchneeded continuity. They’ve lived a company’s legacy, and they needto be around to share it so that customers are served, mistakes getmade only once, and golden opportunities are not missed. Ralph Thorpis busy training younger salespeople. “I have a history to share,”he says, “and best of all, they are interested in listening. Wecan learn from each other.”The good news is that most Traditionalists have bigger plans thansitting on a porch swing all day drinking ice tea. The bad news isthat most managers aren’t so good at identifying the high potentialTraditionalist candidates. They might be great at singling out the25-to-35 year-old with spunk, but few are taking time to spot the62-year-old with the energy to morph into new roles.Attracting the best young workers. Unfortunately, whenit comes to Millennials, workers born after 1982, organizations aremaking two costly assumptions:Some assume that the Millennials will be just like those who havegone before them. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there’sone thing we’ve learned about the generations, it’s that each onehas its own generational personality. Organizations will have to getto know the Millennials without making the same mistake so many madewith Generation X.Millennials, too, will have a unique set of values and expectationsabout work, and unless their viewpoints are clearly understood, historyis bound to repeat itself.Others assume there’s no hurry to get to know the Millennials —after all, most companies are still struggling to figure out GenerationX! The fact is, the time to recruit them is now.In many industries, such as high tech, Millennials are being recruitedwhile they’re still in trade school, high school, or college. At Vir2L,one of the hottest Web design firms, the average age of a top designerisn’t 25 to 45; it’s 17 to 24! Smart industries are forming connectionswith schools through internship programs and mentoring opportunitiesthat can introduce Millennials to their companies in positive ways— long before they’re ready to hit the workforce full time.The Fibre Box Association, for one, isn’t waiting around until theMillennials have all decided where they want to work. It can’t affordto. The Fibre Box people know that not many Millennial designers aresitting around computer screens pondering the future of the litholabel. So Fibre Box has gone on the offensive and formed relationshipswith trade schools to introduce Millennials in computer-aided designprograms to the industry. It’s a real eye-opener for young designerswho might never have thought about where that colorful Cap’n Crunchbox came from. By providing job placement opportunities with the manufacturerswho are their members, this old world industry is carving out a bravenew world by opening Millennials’ eyes to an exciting career option.Creating new niches. If you always go where you alwayswent, you’ll always get what you always got. To find new employeesto fill new niches, you’re going to have to step outside the statusquo. Sometimes this means tapping into a generation you’ve never hiredbefore. Other times that’s not enough. But once you understand whothe generations are and what makes them tick, you can use that knowledgeto discover generational niches that are the equivalent of buriedtreasure.To fill a niche, create an itch. Some of the toughestrecruiting battles in the country are being waged in the field ofeducation. As the Millennial boom has exploded into schools, the battleto fill teaching positions has reached crisis proportions. In Californiaalone, 200,000 teachers will be needed in the next 10 years. In Minneapolis,Minnesota, districts have had to hire so rapidly that 65 percent ofthe city’s teachers have less than five years’ experience.Newsweek reported that administrators in Chicago arerecruiting retirees as a way of boosting the rolls of available substituteteachers. “Creating an itch” means first finding the retiredteachers, letting them know how much they are needed as subs, andthen providing transportation to and from school via van shuttles.It seems senior subs tend to turn down assignments located too farfrom public transportation, but they’ll fill a niche if they havea built-in way of getting to and from work.To bring in the Boomers, Las Vegas’s Clark County School Districthas developed a new program called E-March, aimed at snatching upretiring military officers.That means getting out to military bases and targeting those 40 and50-year-olds who have put in the 20 years necessary to be eligiblefor a full pension and enticing them with the idea of a new career.But the Las Vegas district doesn’t stop there. To extend a hand toXers, it is enticing them with promises of year-round sunshine, sansblizzards and state income tax. For candidates who can’t afford tofly to Vegas for an interview, the district provides high-tech videophonesto interview them remotely. Techno-flexibility has convinced Gen Xteachers from 42 states to pack their bags and relocate.Find somebody else’s niche and steal it. Farmers Insurance,which has been experiencing a dearth of qualified candidates to becomeinsurance agents, is doing its part to make the teacher shortage evenworse. The company created a profile of who makes the best agentsand then opened their minds to search the universe for where thatnew niche of candidates might exist.Boomers and Xers who are established, successful teachers sprang tomind and onto the pages of a new recruiting campaign. While it’s probablynot too popular with school principals, the Farmers strategy makessense. Schoolteachers are well-organized, people-oriented self-starterswith vast numbers of contacts within their communities to help themget launched in sales.Create a new identity entity. If all else fails in theeffort to identify creative new generational niches, you might haveto create your own. The CIA did just that in Silicon Valley. Unableto compete for the brightest Generation X workers and the hottestnew technology against the glitz, glamour, and cold hard capital ofSilicon Valley, the CIA decided to become a player.The result is a newly formed venture capital company called In-Q-Tel,a private nonprofit funded with $28 million authorized by Congress.Its mission is to “invest in high-tech start-ups that will helpthe spy agency regain the edge in gizmos and gadgets that it onceheld over the private sector.”Forming a new entity with a hipper style enables the CIA to get thebest of both-access to the Gen Xers they want and acquisition of thetechnologies they need to thrive in an, increasingly competitive globalenvironment. Even In-Q-Tel’s style is a sharp departure from the buttoned-downrecruiting approach you might expect. Their website promises freewheelingtechies the opportunity to work on “cool s-!”Corrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
