The Good (and The Bad) in Hiring The Fresh Grads of 2016
Graduation season is about to commence and soon enough, the fresh grads will be framing their diplomas and picking up their resumes. Your HR inbox will start to flood with inquiries and applications from the class of 2016 and it’s probably best that you know what you’re getting yourself into.
TOPICS
The Good
Truckloads of enthusiasm
They are fresh. As terrified as they are to enter the “real world”, these kids are just as excited to get to work and learn. They understand that making mistakes is part of learning but they minimize the risk by doing their research regarding endeavour-relevant systems and procedures.
Young people today take several things into consideration before they choose jobs or careers. They veer towards interest and passion based careers as opposed to Generation Y’s money motivated course. You can also bet on them being ambitious so in hiring fresh graduates, you will get a refreshing wave of proactivity and an eagerness to excel.
Work Is Life; Life Is Work
Millennials and Generation Z have realigned their priorities and re-organized the structure and dynamic of student organizations and extra-curricular activities. Beyond having a cause, theme, or advocacy, they are interested in real impact and they require an organized means of getting there. In short, they don’t see work as just work: they want to make work part of a life they’re living to the fullest.
Plus, as undergraduates, they have already taught themselves to become well-versed in sales, marketing, design, and finance even if they come from otherwise unrelated disciplines. Those who don’t have work experience per se are nonetheless well-rounded and have a varied and practiced skill set.
Innovative like never before
Considering they grew up in a technological and globalized world, the access they have to information is being put to good use.There is no generation as tech savvy as this one. They are constantly tinkering and discovering new hacks and bypasses.
To these kids, innovation is a science. They are full of trackers, methods, and metrics and are constantly hungry to improve things, either making them sustainable or gain a profit. They find satisfaction in deconstructing a product, service, or idea and reconfiguring how it functions, optimizing it in the process.
The Bad
Lack of professionalism
It may come from a lack of experience but a downside to hiring these fresh grads is they are a little more used to getting things handed to them. When you grow up with readily available access to resources, it makes you lazy, impatient, and almost too comfortable in an array of environments.
Young people challenge hierarchies and some don’t even acknowledge them. They value results over anything else. The lack of professionalism can stem from a) not knowing how to be professional, b) finding it unnecessary and refusing it, or c) simply not caring because there are a hundred other things on their minds.
Job hopping
These kids are used to fast paced environments and strive for quick results/successes. They are easily dissatisfied when things take too long or are unexpectedly inefficient. Their short attention spans will get fidgety and when things are not snappy, they will look for something that will be.
Job hopping is common to millennials. They’re interested in so many things and embrace it all so that when something better or more interesting comes along, they jump at it. Stability is disappearing from their vocabulary. In their eyes, they are in search of an ideal job and they get to learn from several different angles or industries. For employers, it’s an erratic headache.
Entitled like never before
Precisely because these fresh graduates are interested, concerned, and skilled in so many things, they feel as though they have a right to what they aspire to. Their expectations of society are, at times, unrealistically high and it gives them a clouded perception of what working and actually making a living is like.
Oftentimes they see themselves as above menial tasks and while a slap in the face comes soon enough, it takes some longer than others to come back down to reality.
Does the good outweigh the bad? With millennials and Generation Z set to make up over half of the workforce, we’ll leave that decision to you.
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