What about the discrimination against young people?

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The DirectEmployers Association conference (DEAM14) last week was just amazing, attracting the right attention on new regulations to improve the employment of veterans as well as people with disabilities — this is summarized by the OFCCP news release last August. Yet, there is something just as bad happening right now, The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults, as described by a report from the Brookings/ Brookings/Metropolitan Policy Program.

The takeaway is this: "Employment prospects for teens and young adults in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas plummeted between 2000 and 2011."

Key findings

The report segments its findings into two major age categories: teens aged 16-19 and Young adults aged 20-24

• For teens aged 16-19: Employment rates declined drastically, from 44 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2011.
• For young adults aged 20-24: The employment rate among young adults fell from 72 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2011.

The problem affects all young people and the report provides multiple graphs on the effect of education, previous employment and sometimes, geographic differences. If you are a teen, it's better to live in Utah than in Silicon Valley. This is also true if you are an educated young adult even if the contrast is not so big.

Traditional divides — or call them discriminatory factors — are still very much in place. Regardless of the criteria and the models, non-Hispanic whites have a better chance of getting a job. One of the models for young adults shows how age, race/ethnicity, marital status, and education are in play for males and females. While being older was associated with increased employment chances for both genders, race/ethnicity play differently for males and females:

• Being African/American was associated with reduced employment among men, but not women;
• Being Asian was associated with reduced employment among both men and women;
• Being Hispanic was associated with increased employment among men but not women;
• And... marital status has an impact! It is positively associated with employment for men and negatively associated for women. Read: employers are wary about employing young women who could become pregnant.

The report lists important measures and initiatives designed to reduce youth joblessness and labor force underutilization, incorporate work-based learning into education, adjust to regional labor market needs, and encourage employers to facilitate the transition of young people into the labor market.

This survey should be a wake-up call to just anybody who has children or simply cares about young people as well as diversity in the workplace. The solutions are compelling and most of the organizations named in the report are doing an amazing job attracting the attention of a fundamental problem: where can a country go when so much of its youth is unemployed or underemployed?

Open questions

The underlying assumption of the report is that youth unemployment and underemployment are primarily caused by a discrepancy between available skills and the needs of the labor market. This may be true to some extent, but not entirely.

Is it really all about our current education system? Do we have data showing that people who were 20 in 1970, in 1980, in 1990 or in 2000 were better prepared and was more employable? These are questions for researchers such as Peter Cappelli. I suggest that you read Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It , which I discussed in an earlier post or Why Employers Aren't Filling Their Open Jobs, recently published by the Harvard Business Review: "Jobs have not changed over the last couple of years in any way that changed skill requirements substantially. The “failing schools” notion, even if it was true, couldn’t explain the continued unemployment of the majority of job seekers, who graduated years ago and had jobs just before the recession," Cappelli notes.

Do recruiting budget cuts make it more difficult to spot the right skills? It's unclear. I agree with Peter Cappelli that unemployment/underemployment may "come from the ways in which contemporary practices have made hiring more difficult," and that a higher scrutiny on profit-and-loss and "cost-cutting took out recruiters." Yet, the latter should also be further investigated. The Talent Management market continues to grow at an impressive rate. So if more money is spent, is it spent efficiently? What if the systems and methodologies that have controlled the recruiting industry for the last 25 years were showing their inability to identify modern days talent?

My personal take on the discrimination against young people

We all look for the "right" skills. Yet, what exactly are these right skills? People who have existing skills or people with a potential to do a good job? If the right skills are out there, are we even able to capture them?

Trying to evaluate and manage 20 year-old candidates using 20 year-old or even a 10-year transactional systems may be a huge problem. Look at it this way: it's like prospecting the world with a 28.8k Modem in 1994 or a 56k Modem in 2000. So traditional approaches may work for 22 year-old candidates with a boilerplate education for boilerplate job requisitions and boilerplate skills that are themselves defined via the prism of these transactional systems filtering out candidates... Yet, can such hiring practices capture new behaviors derived from a decade-old social world and be fair to the new generation? Probably not. The entire process might discriminate against young people, a trend that's likely to worsen if it's true, as Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University, claims, that "65 percent of children entering grade school this year [2012] will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet."

Today youth unemployment may cost $25 billion annually in net losses to federal and state governments according to the Young Invincibles. This does not include the image and opportunity costs for corporations who ignore these young people... Companies reluctant to take a chance on people young people and eventually spend money training them could reconsider their position after examining the costs of all their recent bad hires (often people whom they believed had the right skills and "good resumes). The problem affects seven in ten businesses and costs U.S. businesses an estimated $300 billion in 2009. Remember, even Tony Hsieh, the CEO of a notoriously great company, said in 2010 that his own bad hires had cost Zappos "well over $100 million." Doesn't this mean that the way to evaluate skills is a real problem? So why not change?

Chances are that hiring young people and training them may be a better economic bet than only looking at "vetted" people, provided of course, that you use a recruiting methodology and infrastructure that enable you to connect and engage with them!

The value of the Pew Research test: "How Millennial are you?"

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Over the past few months, lots of people have taken the Pew Research test ‘How millennial are you?, which is part of 2010 research project "Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next."

Most people like tests. It's a narcissistic thing: we brag (or don't brag) about the results. Yet, tests are not simply about us. They are about understanding how we stand in relation to others. If you are a Baby Boomer or a Gen X, chances are that you did not take it considering that you are not a Millennial anyway. Yet if you do, you will:

• Discover that being a millennial is not simply an age category, but also a mindset. Age isn't the only thing that makes you millennial—habits do too, as Time said to its readers when they invited them to take the test.

• Be able to assess the efforts you must make to better understand a group you may not belong to (age- or behavior-wise). It's worth it:  Generation Y will make up 75 percent of the workforce by the year 2025. So no company will survive without them. But even more importantly today employers are struggling to retain them and according to a survey by Millennial Branding, almost one-third of companies lost a minimum of 15 percent of their Gen Y employees in the last year. These losses cost companies anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 per Millennial lost.

The Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First, by Andrew Benett

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Authored by Andrew Benett, the global president of Havas Worldwide and two co-authors Ann O'Reilly and W. Barksdale Maynard, respectively Content Director and Researcher, also at Havas, The Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First is an excellent book composed of two main sections:

• A Transformed Business Environment, which explains the need to start a Conversation on Talent. 
• Six Essential Strategies for Success: When people are the actual assets of most companies, hiring and nurturing top talent is the way to build up and sustain competitive advantage.

Look for "talent," and not simply for "workers"

The change in terminology mirrors a significant change in the business environment. Silicon Valley can be deemed to have a significant place in the "Talent Revolution." However business and sociological changes have compelled lots of organizations, regardless of their size and activity, to place a premium on "T-shaped employees," expression coined in 1991 by David Guest in 1991 to define employees who combine vertical expertise with the experience and ability to work across functions, as well as on millennials who will account for three out of every four workers globally by 2025.

The semantic difference between workers and talent is critical: "workers" are supposed to do things the way they were always done. Talent makes things happen in "The Rise of the ideas economy," where it's not enough to fill a position, and where creativity and agility matter.

The mandate is to ultimately "turn your company as a talent magnet" and address new expectations, ranging from a new emphasis on paychecks with a purpose, to the desire of a more sustainable work-life integration, an uninterrupted digital life as well as more eclectic career paths: "Top recruits are unwilling to sacrifice their own brands to prop up companies that are unlikely to take them where they want to go."

The six essential strategies to success

This is the heart of the book in six recommendations: 1) Cultivate Your Culture, 2) Attend to Your DNA, 3) Live What’s Next, 4) Create a Sense of Dynamism, 5) Be People-Centric, 6) Make It Mean Something.

These six essential strategies are illustrated through multiple studies of "talent centric" organizations such as Zappos, DreamWorks, Hall Capital Partners, Whirlpool, Unilever, Nestle or Dow Chemical to name a few. Mike Bailen summarizes quite eloquently what Zappos is looking for: “We need our employees to be versatile and adaptable because Zappos embraces and drives change (this is a core value, after all). If employees are too specialized and  compartmentalized, it limits our ability to evolve. However, we do need our new hires to fully understand and deliver on the job they are brought in for.”

The days of "the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and a stifling kind of hyper-conformity," are gone, and an astonishing 84% of senior business leaders surveyed agree with this statement: “I am most interested in hiring people who are smart and passionate, even if they do not yet possess the skills we need," again validating the findings and advice of George Anders.

The talent mandate starts at the top. Talent is not just the focus of HR and the recruiting departments. It's the business of every single stakeholder, starting with executives capable of commissioning new best practices and entrusting business leaders to follow suit. Now how can the mandate actually be carried out? "To create a company that is relentlessly creative and entrepreneurial, you have to start at the beginning— with hiring," Andrew Benett rightfully notes.

Yet, what about the "how" of the implementation? It's clear that the mandate entails rethinking the entire talent acquisition function and requires a whole new generation of technology capable of engaging with talent and supporting novel HR content marketing strategies — an additional dimension to the what Andrew Benett call the "we space.". You can't reach the moon without a spacecraft!

Uniting Open Networks and Hierarchy in Talent Networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

"We can walk our road together

If our goals are all the same.

We can run alone and free

If we pursue a different aim.

Let the truth of love be lighted,

Let the love of truth shine clear.

Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty,

With the Heart and Mind united in a single perfect Sphere."

--Neil Peart, The Sphere: A Kind of Dream

Again with the Millennials and Generation Y. Those were the first words out of his mouth and I immediately became polarized to my previous points of Generation Now.

The ones about treating everyone non-generationally and talking with them straight. That being passionate about what you do is one of the most important tenets of the world of work, ever, regardless of when you were born. That today we’re not only loyal and committed to the work that moves and schools us, but also to the people who are part of that committed work — because that’s the work that moves us to do greater things for the world.

That’s the work that makes it easier for startups to start up and for established companies to grow — creating new jobs and replacing some of those lost over the past five years, including full-time, part-time, flex time, contract, and project work, and any combination of those and more that you can imagine. That’s the work that transforms technologies, processes, communities, and the very heart and soul of the world.

At least that’s what thought at first listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote at this year’s SHRM Conference & Exposition in Atlanta. Because he said, “Let’s talk about Millennials.”

But that’s not where he went at all. In fact, speaking of being “moved and schooled” in the end, I certainly was. No, where he went was talking about two generational differences that do exist – and should co-exist.

These are:

• Hierarchy
• Open Networks

What Malcolm explained so eloquently and intelligently is that we've gone from hierarchical, disciplined, centralized social organizations (think Boomers and Gen X) to collaborative, amorphous, organic, open social networks (think Gen Y and Z).

Which isn’t really a good or bad thing, because they’re two very different worldviews that have changed dramatically the way we participate in the world of work yesterday and today. On the one had you’ve got the traditional top-down management structure that according to Malcolm began to break down in the 1970’s when individuals began to demand more ownership over their career aspirations (and paychecks). And then on the tail end of my generation, Gen X, those born in the 1980’s and 1990’s found knowledge and power in the collective, their personal and professional social networks that upended the top-down structure.

But the amorphous nature of open networks versus the structured leadership of a strong few – the differences between the succinct success of Civil Rights movement and the oblique success Occupy movement in the examples that Malcolm shared – tells a tale of two separate states of mind and heart. However, when combined, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Think different. Think Apple – open social networks internally run by a formidable dictator and brilliant business mind.

Apply this strategy to your open talent networks, the ones made up of new candidates, current employees, management and the like – the ones you’re sourcing from for any position current or future. But manage the networks with structure and direction and sound leadership, however you decide to do it.

Embedding hierarchy into open networks makes for magic, uniting hearts and minds. That’s what truly transforms technologies, processes, communities, and the very heart and soul of the world of work.