Hiring the Net Generation

I read an interesting article on BusinessWeek this morning; a couple of lines stuck out to me in particular.

Once the recession is over, the smart companies that have hired top young talent will be in a prime position to survive the next war: the war for talent. As one of my clients said to me, “A recession is a terrible thing to waste.”

Its an add-on notion that businesses that cut back during a recession limit their abilities to grow when its over.  However, for many the Net Generation as this article calls them (otherwise known as Gen Y or Millenials) stand as a bit of a mystery or yet another problem to overcome.

Regardless how you feel about them, they are changing the rules of engagement.  Running an ad in your local newspaper isn’t going to find top talent among this group.  So where are you going to find them?  How are employers going to attract the Net Generation?

[listdot]

• Informative web sites
• blogs and podcasts
• Multimedia on YouTube and Facebook
• Hiring FAQ page in the form of a wiki [/listdot]

The author also suggests wisely that companies and interviewers need to start looking at interviews as two-way dialogue.  Employers are being evaluated just as mach as the candidate, and this extends into the 90-day probationary period.

Supervision may be on the way out, too. Brad Anderson , chief executive of Best Buy (BBY), puts it this way: “The Net Geners we hire have enormous knowledge, unprecedented information, and facility with tools that in some areas is superior to their seniors.” So the job of management is more to create the context whereby they can be successful, rather than to supervise them.