Leading and managing Gen Y - is it still an issue?

The evidence suggests "yes".

Take the government sector as an example. We have been chosen (and we're honoured!) to partner with the Australian Public Service Commission to deliver a full day program called: Leading, engaging and retaining generation Y graduates and emerging talent.

The first program has sold out. Seven major federal government departments are involving their graduate managers and supervisors because the issue is very real.

And the corporate sector has shown similar signs.

In fact, even approaching the height of the global downturn in late 2008, 61% of CEOs reported still having enormous difficulty in attracting and retaining Generation Y graduates ("Millennials at work: Perspectives from a new generation" PwC).

As the Australian economy improves and our relatively low unemployment rate of 5% stabilises, power will shift back towards the employee and young people will regain confidence, high expectations and new choices between jobs and careers. Educated graduates will again lead the charge and leadership will continue to matter.

From over 100 surveys of more than 40,000 participants conducted by McCrindle Research, 42% of Generation Y respondents reported that poor leadership and management was the main reason for leaving their previous role. (Mark McCrindle, The ABC of XYZ – Understanding Global Generations).

So is the solution to teach your leaders and managers the "Generation Y" mindset to better lead, manage and retain your graduates?

I don't think so. Generational segmentation was designed (and is very useful) for things like marketing and workforce planning. Not for leadership. It's all about how to lead and manage the individual.

One part of the solution is to help your leaders and managers to adopt the Multi-Generational Mindset.

The Multi-Generational Mindset appreciates generational influences but cuts through generational paradigms and assumptions by focusing on the individual's needs.

The Multi-Generational Mindset:
* Inspires you to appreciate external influences on generational groups;
* Challenges you to rethink generational paradigms when leading and managing people;
* Develops 'behavioural flexibility' as a key still of the multi-generational leader;
* Equips you to tap into the values, styles and motivators of individuals, not their generations;
* Empowers you to better appreciate, lead and inspire people of any generation.

The more keynote talks I give to leaders and managers about the Multi-Generational Mindset and the more our team works with them in leadership development programs, the more evidence we find of this.

Helping leaders reframe their thinking about generations to adopt a Multi-Generational Mindset leads to stronger relationships, stronger coaching and mentoring and increased on-the-job development of their people.

And with this, everybody wins. The business wins because they get more bang for their buck from their people. The program manager wins because senior leadership sees they're adding even more value to the business.

People win because they now find themselves working with more managers who are better leaders, more of the time.

So is leading and managing Generation Y still an issue? Yes. Adopting the Multi-Generational Mindset is a big part of the solution.

How could your leaders and managers also benefit from developing the Multi-Generational Mindset?

Your staff are on the move!

Three significant statistics have come to my attention recently

1.       82% of Australians are NOT engaged at work

2.       68% of Australians browse jobs online at least once a week

3.       19.9% is the average annual employee turnover rate

So what does this mean?

It means that it is highly likely a significant number of your staff are considering a move!

What can you do about it?

Obviously, but highly unadvisable, do nothing and hope that your business is not severely effected.

Great businesses and great business leaders will be proactive in identifying where they can make improvements and implementing change with urgency.

Where should you be looking?

You should be looking at your retention strategies

·         Do you have a clear corporate culture?

·         Is that reflected in your employment brand?

·         Do your staff recognize the brand in a way the company would like them to?

·         Is the brand strong enough to retain staff and to stop them from moving to the competition?

How can you answer these questions?

Review your culture and employment brand by answering these questions

1.       If I was an employee would I be attracted to work for the company (don’t assume that because staff work for your business already that they are necessarily engaged)

2.       Would I be attracted to stay with the company

3.       Would passive candidates be interested in joining the company

4.       Who would be repeled by the culture and

5.       Are they the types of talent that I don’t need for my company

At the same time investigate your talent attraction and assessment strategies

·         Are they targeted

·         Are they easily accessable

·         Do they include early personal contact with the people in your company

·         Are you using technology

·         Are you making informed but appropriately speedy decisions

·         Is your on-boarding innovative

·         Do you have a performance review process which is integrated into your attraction and assessment methodologies

Get some help if you want to but ignore this issue at your peril in 2010 and beyond.

The world of Talent Attraction, Assessment and Retention is changing at a meteoric rate!!

Today job boards are still the most used attraction tool but that is changing very quickly. Professional and social networking, as a Talent attraction tool is growing in popularity.

And while attraction trends are changing so are assessment tools and processes.

Tools to reduce costs and improve accuracy are starting to change the Talent assessment world in substantial ways.

In particular, the use of video in the attraction and assessment process is being recognised as a cost effective and time saving tool.

Jobwire is now using video as part of the talent application process – simply asking applicants to provide a 30 second video introducing them to us alongside their cover letter.

What benefits come from using video in the application process

1. time saving – your ability to assess talent for interview is greatly enhanced – less interviews because you have a more complete picture of each applicant and in most cases shorter interviews as some of the work is done prior to interview through the video.
2. Higher quality talent – in this era of easy application through job board advertising and the plethora of non-appropriate applicants – the video request proves to be a self assessment tool with casual applicants opting not to take the time.
3. for the HR professional it is much easier and faster to get hiring manager buy in because they can “meet” the applicant prior to booking precious interview time.
4. reduces the need for second or further follow up interviews – how, let me give you an example. Recently a client of jobwire, presented with two great applicants that couldn’t be separated after interview and references were about to be called in for second interview – cost time spent re-interviewing by hiring managers and delay in the decision making process. Jobwire asked the client to nominate the questions that would be most important in the second interview, the applicants were asked to do a video of themselves answering those questions. It proved highly effective and the employer was able to make a decision next day rather than waiting for two suitable occasions to re-interview.

 There are other trends in the assessment of talent that are both cost and time effective and as in the next example scientific.

There has been a need to use more science in the talent assessment process for many years – we have all tried expensive, post interview assessment tools – with great success. But now there is a pre-interview assessment tool proving invaluable in our assignments.

Checkster – an online reference and/or 360 profiling tool. It brings science to your assessment process – at very low cost – and is best used prior to interview therefore assessing out some applicants in-appropriate for interview.

Its time we all re-evaluated or talent attraction, assessment and retention processes and tools – there are some exciting options.

welcome to jobwire sponsored yellow magnet talent roundtable inaugural edition!

Over 7% of Australian organisations have no formal process for tracking where their talent comes from

Employee Referrals are recalculated as only 16.7%. Adjusting our US study in February of 14 sources to the Australian SOT‐09 results (by combining both internal and external sources into one list), our 5 top results (which also account for about 3 of 4 of the total) would be: 

Internal Movement (including promotion) ‐ 38.8%, Employee Referrals ‐ 16.7%, Corporate Web site ‐12.3%, Job Boards ‐ 7.5%, and Direct Sourcing ‐ 4.8% 

It is interesting to note that if internal promotion (Australia) and internal movement (US) are defined similarly then the hires attributed to Australia’s Internal Recruiters are proportionately 6 times smaller! Not a minor difference no matter how you count this category. Are movement and promotion cycles vastly different than in the US? Does that have an impact on expectations and consequently turnover and retention? 

Job boards are considered a source for Australia hires nearly 4 times as often as in the US. 

Could it be that job boards just aren’t attributed as often in the US because other sources take precedence?

In Australia referrals lead to hires half as often. This gap becomes significantly wider when adjusting employee referrals within an employer environment from all other types.

Not surprisingly (at least to me), the adjusted numbers for how often company web sites are attributed as a source is nearly the same in Australia and the US. And I’m still of the opinion they can’t ever be the source. They are the destination.

A quick comparison of adjusted numbers attributed to agency hires shows the US at 1.7% versus 6.8% (really 9.9% if you compare only the employer hires).

Some of the difference is explained simply by the differences in the sizes of the firms participating in the respective studies ‐ but not all. Honestly I would have thought Agency/Third Party hires in Australia were much higher. 

In both the US and Australian data, the attribution of social network sites in staffing is still quite small.

The reasons require a much longer conversation than this quick take but both collection methods and investor hype are part of the answer.