There seems to be a sentiment amongst some of the working world that there is no reason to hire someone from my generation. Obviously, it can be difficult to justify hiring someone young and inexperienced for a position, where you will have to invest time and money in training them, when the weak economy has filled the market with older, more experienced people who are willing to take the job at the same salary level. But there is something subtler going on, which is often only expressed in the op. ed. articles of news outlets such as Time Magazine. The perception seems to be that millennials are entitled, lazy, and fickle. Don’t believe the articles though; companies should hire millennials. Millennials bring a lot to the table. They are young and energetic, they are have a fresh perspective, they live natively in modern technology, and the negatives about them are not grounded in fact.
An ancient truism is that old age and treachery will beat youth and vigor every time. When translated to the business world, this means a veteran employee with years of experience will generally be a more capable worker than their younger, more inexperienced counterparts. While this is true, there are certain advantages that the youthful and vigorous will usually have over old age and experience. Young people haven’t settled down into a family yet. This makes them much more willing to travel for work. The Internet has basically killed the travelling salesman in many ways, but for those companies that need to have face-to-face interactions with their customers, such as on-site installation and maintenance, training, or client meetings, someone needs to go and be the boots on the ground, to borrow the military term. Similarly, the same freedom lets them be more flexible with their scheduling, which is ideal when overtime is needed to meet production crunches going into deadlines. They can also push themselves further during those crunch times, thanks to the extra energy their youth provides.
Young people also offer a new or unique perspective, which can be valuable on both the micro and macro scale. Think about how social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, have changed the way in which consumers interact with companies, celebrities interact with fans, and the way communities form around ideas and movements. These are all evolutions that grew out of youth oriented new technologies, especially in the case of Facebook. The perspective of millennials won’t necessarily shake the foundations of business every day, but it can still be helpful in solving a problem or reaching a breakthrough. There are many studies that show that boards of directors, both in companies and in non-profits, benefit from having a mixture of men and women on the board. Men and women view the world differently, so a healthy discussion arises between different world-views, and the compromise is always better than the product of a single world-view. Having a mixture of millennials, Gen-X, and baby-boomers in the company environment accomplishes a similar objective. It brings together three different age groups with different outlooks, and the aggregate of their work will be better than the product of any one group working alone.
Possibly one of the most overlooked aspects of the millennial as a potential worker, and heavily related to the unique perspective that they offer, is in the way in which most millennials have lived their life in the digital age. I remember when my parents brought home the family Apple II when I was in third grade, and playing Oregon Trail when I was in fifth grade. I remember when I was first introduced to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in early high school, and realizing that I was behind the times. Millennials sleep, eat, drink, and breathe consumer technology. We buy everything on Amazon, we use our phones to keep track of the world through social media, and only a few of us remember a time before the Internet, or a time before video games were a mass media. I have never believed that older people can’t learn computers, and should just draft a young person to fix things whenever they break, but one has to acknowledge the difference in experiences between a millennial and a baby-boomer, especially where computers and modern consumer technology are concerned.
This manifests itself in a few key ways that are important to a company looking to hire a new employee. People who have lived natively in a system interact with it differently than those who are “transplanted,” in other words, those who have studied it extensively but haven’t “lived it” in the same way. For example, everything I know about computers, past the basics, is largely self-taught. Some have postulated that the Hacker Ethos, as defined as the need to tinker, invent, and self discover with technology, is a driving force for the success of America’s tech industry, with luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as emblematic of that mindset. In the same way, people of my generation tinkered with their computers, self-optimizing things like typing and shorthand for chat services such as IRC and AIM. Consider the flexibility and customization desired in a smartphone, from apps to home-screen widgets, or Apple’s intuitive designs for the original iPod and OSX. The former promotes self-optimization through personal UI choice, and the latter meshes with the tinkering mindset in that the system can be easily learned without a manual. Carrying that forward, tinkering with a system can change the way that system is viewed or used. Living in technology causes most millennials to naturally gravitate towards how a technology should be used, regardless of what its stated purpose is. Twitter started out as a fairly inane micro-blogging service. Now it’s a huge networking tool, a user-friendly RSS feed, a news aggregator, and an extremely effective promotional tool. It has also assisted in raising millions of dollars for crowdfunding projects and been the cornerstone of major political movements and protests. Seeing these trends before they take off, which millennials are ideally suited to do, will help a business posture itself correctly for the future.
So even if all of these positives exist, do they really outweigh the negatives? What about all of those things that get written about in Time Magazine? Well, let’s examine those three fundamental complaints about millennials as employees. Are they as entitled, lazy, and fickle as people say?
“Millennials are entitled,” people write, “They think life should give them what they want just for showing up.” I can’t dispute that there were people from my generation that felt that level of entitlement three or four years ago, especially immediately after graduating college. Many had been coached that their life path was a simple transition from high school to college, and from college to a career. When the economy collapsed, it blew this concept apart and left many wondering where they were supposed to find the job they were promised. However, that mentality is swiftly dying in the face of reality. People in my age group, who have been out of college for several years, are still underemployed or, even worse, still unemployed. Many are college-educated, hard-working people who struggle to get noticed in this competitive economy. The idea that life was going to just give them a job died somewhere in the first year after graduation. As for the recent graduates, and current college seniors, they are aware enough of the state of the world that when they look forward to their life after graduation, they are scared out of their minds that all that awaits them is the same job they had in high school. I don’t know of many college students that still believe a career awaits every one of them when they graduate. On a related note, if you give any of the numerous underemployed twenty-somethings a job, you can expect to get a hard worker. Based on my talks with my peers, many would be so grateful to have a job in their desired field they would work tirelessly to make sure they didn’t mess up and lose it.
“Millennials are hard workers? I thought they were all lazy.” Like I mentioned above, millennials are likely going to be hard workers because they can’t believe their good fortune in being hired. But that isn’t the only reason to believe millennials will be hard workers. Unemployed and underemployed millennials are often working as hard as many office employees because they feel a sense of urgency about starting their careers, especially with the down-turned economy. Using my own schedule as an example, I work a full workday optimizing every aspect of my job applications. To begin with, there is finding the job postings in the first place. Since there isn’t one good site that aggregates all listings, or even all listings in a given field, daily swings through LinkedIn, Indeed.com, and Craigslist are needed to search for relevant openings. Even then, plenty of jobs are only listed on the company’s websites, so occasional visits to company websites are necessary to keep tabs on their employment opportunities. For each application, I start off with research, during which I pour over the company’s website: I read their blog, I listen to their podcasts, I watch all of the videos on their YouTube or Vimeo. After I’ve finished with their easily accessible web presence, I head to Google to look for interviews their leadership has given to leading magazines or websites, I look for recent news about their company and its business, and I look at reviews from their clients and from their employees. Then, I condense all of this information into the most salient points I want to mention in a carefully crafted, and customized to each application, cover letter. Next I reread, edit, review, and get feedback from friends and family on the cover letter, before starting with the resume. Finally, I tweak my stock resume to fit the job description, and review the revisions to catch typos. In addition to applications, I write follow-up emails for each position between a week and two weeks after submitting, carefully crafting each one to both confirm that my application had been received without incident and to restate my worthiness for the position, often including some of my qualifications I wasn’t able to fit in the initial cover letter. I also spend some time making sure I stay on top of trends, both in the industries I’m applying to and in the best practices in HR, in an effort to keep myself competitive. And all of that is on top of the work I do in my video production business, which is how I make enough money to live.
“Millennials are fickle. Nothing, from lovers to jobs, seems to hold their interest for very long.” MTV’s quick cutting style apparently killed the attention span of an entire generation, including people like me who never really watched MTV, and short form social tools like Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging also apparently ruined the ability of my generation to have and express coherent thoughts. Of course, this is the same generation that is on track to be the best educated generation in American history. So what is the deal with this perception of fickleness? Part of it stems from the cultural differences between the baby-boomer and millennial mindset. Referring again to MTV, millennials were drawn to that channel’s style of music video production because it was bold and new. The new technology driven visuals, combined with a fresh editing style, were unlike anything that had come before. For the same reason that baby-boomers loved Rock and Roll, and their parents despised it, millennials glommed on to the novelty of MTV. This isn’t good or bad, but it does create a divide in taste that can color inter-generational communication. In short, some people just don’t “Get It,” and that’s perfectly fine, to each his own, but just because one age group enjoys brevity and the other doesn’t is not indicative of some major failing of an entire generation of people. All of that aside, the main place that baby-boomers accurately describe millennials as fickle is in the workplace. In particular, millennials don’t seem to stay at a company for very long, often only a couple of years, before moving on to other opportunities. There is precedent for this behavior, however, which can be found in the employment trends of Silicon Valley. For years, tech companies have been stonewalling their employees when it comes to promotions. So, seeking career improvement, employees jump ship, finding it easier to find a better position at another company. With the current market as it is, this has spread from the tech sector to most of the country. Whereas one company might not have the money to support a promotion, another company in the same field might be hiring for a position equivalent to said promotion. The smart move, then, is to switch employer. This last bit isn’t so much of a reason to hire a millennial as it is a wake-up call. If there are no open paths for career advancement within a company, barring extremely good benefits and/or extremely rewarding work, people will look to other companies to find advancement. They won’t quit, and risk the volatile job market unemployed, but they may start hunting around while still employed. And it isn’t just the young.
Back many years ago when I played WarCraft III, there was a custom map called Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), which was intensely skill-based. It was a team-based game where every player’s performance is critical, and one bad player could easily ruin a game. To avoid this, game hosts would frequently say explicitly in the title: “no noobs.” Even when they didn’t, expressing a lack of knowledge about the game type in the pre-game chat would get you instantly kicked from the pre-game lobby. It was not surprising to me that people would only want to play with other experts, increasing their likelihood of victory, but it did raise the question in my young mind: “If no inexperienced players are allowed to play, how does anyone new ever learn the game?” Despite a slowly dwindling player base, Defense of the Ancients sustained itself for many years, and, in addition to creating an entirely new game genre, spawned two spiritual successors and one actual sequel in Heroes of Newerth, League of Legends, and DOTA 2 respectively. Each of these games, however, had to tackle, in their own way, how to bring in new players or face the death of their game. The American corporation is in a similar place, in my opinion. It is all well and good to keep hiring experienced older employees, especially if they are willing to take an entry-level salary. But eventually those people will retire, and there won’t be anyone who has the skills to take over. All the people who were supposed to step up and take responsibility will have been lost to the millennial generation’s perpetual underemployment. So take a risk, a calculated, intelligent, forward thinking risk, and hire a millennial. They just might surprise you.