Millennial Job Hoppers
November 19, 2019
By. Jonas-Charles Brown
The world of work is changing, with artificial intelligence quickly replacing workers in some of the most menial tasks here in the United States. It is anticipated that 40% of jobs will be replaced by some sort of machine or robot in the next 15 years! With us now able to see well into the future, and with Quantum Computers at Google and IBM solving unimaginable problems. In as little as 200 seconds, problems which once took 10,000 years to solve are now movable. We are in the beginning stages of a new, more innovative approach to work and life in the world.
My mother, a history teacher, changed jobs 3 times in 30 years, prior to retiring. Her jobs were typically secure, the pay good and she was happy with her management, their style, and her role. My mother, a baby boomer, her age in the workforce has come to an end, marking the start of a new age, the entry of the millennial workforce. My father on the other extreme, has spent his career in sales, changing jobs as the market demanded; he now works for himself, a successful real estate broker in California.
What stands out about millennials, what do the numbers reveal? Millennials are superb computer users, a generation who will hone and master AI software, communicators, expert network builders, they are clean eaters, health conscious, millennials are environmentally aware. The most talented of the millennials are being fired from the nation’s employers, at rates never seen in history the generations prior. Not the poor performing millennials, the high performing top talent of the group, have been targeted for dismissal. These off-grid millennials go on to innovate in technology, startup IT firms, venture capitalist companies and many other entrepreneurial endeavors.
The Entrepreneur.com gives you 9 main reasons, that talented millennials are being terminated at such alarming rates, signaling difficulties ahead in retaining, and strategizing succession plans for many organizations across the United States. If you want to retain a millennial it has been said to look within and change your culture. Gone are the days of being unhappy, miserable, overstressed and burnt out at a job.
"Take for example, this Today article about job-hopping losing its ‘stigma’. The journalist in question identifies ‘toxic work environments’, ‘difficult co-workers’, and a mismatch of expectations with reality as the main reasons why people job-hop. He then goes on to investigate if job-hopping still has a stigma attached."1
It's true, frankly speaking that toxicity, unpaid overtime, and a Human Resource suite designed to reject the red from the blue - is leading to a significant change in the makeup of companies. The average age of the employee, productivity and job satisfaction are skewed in the wrong direction. As the workforce shifts from an at-desk model to more of a remote working style, we can take many lessons from some of the best places to work like the Hilton: "It’s sweet validation for Nassetta, who upon taking the reins at Hilton in 2007 found an organization that “had lost our way a bit,” he said. “We forgot that we are a business of people serving people, and the corporate environment got very disconnected from the front line.”" 2
So, if you can't afford massage chairs, if providing training is not up your alley, or if employee perks are secondary to the amount of hours you want an employee to work then you have fall out. " A number of studies have linked stress with shorter telomeres, a chromosome component that's been associated with cellular aging and risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer."3 Millennials are reading white pages, articles, every paper and staying current. We want a better way of working, that won't lead to us succumbing to stress-related diseases.
"Being the Boss" a Harvard Business School Publication by Kent Lineback and Linda Hill, is just as valuable as Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," in the managers toolkit. Millennials want good, fair management. Ideal cultures come with independence, leadership, innovation, and creativity in completing their work.
We don’t want managers to ignore workplace fairness, or those that reprimand us for doing the right thing. Don’t offer 4 weeks of vacation time, and fire someone if they use more than 7 days. Swearing, cursing at, blaming, belittling, and excluding your top talent will hurt your bottom line, and your reputation. Change is hard to move toward in the current business model, and a new way of working is possible in the next few years.
Gone the days of the micromanager, this negative integer is a common denominator for many millennials' mass exit from the workforce. Work smarter, not harder and provide a management model, which respects the trust and independence gained during the interview and hiring process. If you hire me to do a job, let me do that job, while keeping the things that matter least to the process away from tainting productivity. Get to know me as an employee first, and person slowly, you can’t rush either process. Friendship is reserved for those who don't hold against me, my progress, process and ambition to succeed.
It's nice, but not necessary for you to stop in the middle of the day to talk about every offensive political position, to tell a crude joke, or laugh at someone else’s misfortunes. It’s irresponsible for you to require thousands of hours over the life of someone’s career of unpaid overtime to devote to spending with their coworkers. It's time we stopped pretending that life is a reality show and take at face value the impact work life balance has on the workforce.
Job hopping is a symptom of a broken system, for if your systems are efficient, if they were honorable or resilient, you'd have no problem retaining some of the top talent in the nation. On the other end, some employers use algorithms, old ideals, exclusion and a unicolor workforce. Unicolor labels deny some the most talented millennials a quality work environment and prevent hiring managers from accessing the best talent in the market.
In a candidate short market, you have 10 to 1 international applications for domestic jobs. Before a conversation is had as to why a skillset is qualified for a particular role, most candidates are excluded - domestic applicants receive no call back, one email, no human interaction. Employers prefer to keep a job open, unfilled as they look for person X, the AI person, bionic and, need to manage their expectations instead. Have a difficult conversation and impact the workforce by hiring and retaining your 70-80% matches, train, retain, and hire for longevity, stop promoting job hopping.
The way forward is slowing down - getting to know the candidate and his/her skillset. To move forward is to understand what a candidate can and cannot bring into a particular role. Employers are seeking the super candidate, to match 1:1 their job spec, 1:1 their culture, 1:1 their company make up and 1:1 their company politics. Never though in reality, are even the highest paid recruiters, where up to 30% of the first years’ salary is billed to an employer on the successful placement of said employee, consistently successful or capable in making a 100% outright 1:1 match for a majority of hard to fill roles.
If you want to understand a job hopper, stop jumping - to conclusions and ask - for references. Does the millennial have reference letters? Why would someone refer to someone anyway? Why would you? If you shift from a quantity to quality mindset, then you find, plain as day, some of the best line staff, mid managers, senior leaders, and future executives with their resumes sitting right on your desk. Hop down to reality, think things through. Running away from money? I wouldn’t think that’s necessarily the whole truth. Each company has an average age of employees, each company has an employee profile, systems, and best practices.
If you don’t fit, you must have quit.
All things considered, and a few more left to go. Know the companies the job hopper worked for? What is their reputation? How long would you spend at a company rated 1, 2 or even 3 stars before making a change? Not necessarily for more money, but for better management, culture, work life balance and a better working environment. I'll show you success, it's up to you to follow it all the way to its source.
"We believe the most powerful way to recruit alumni is by maintaining an engaged relationship after they’ve left your company." 4 - When the job hopper becomes a boomerang employee attention should be paid. No one returns to a job where they were unhappy. I, for instance, made a choice to return to an employer I left on good terms, after spending seven years outside of education. I returned to my former employer, not only because it was the best place I had ever worked for, but also because the employer fosters within me success skills applicable to any endeavor. I return with a better skill set, and an understanding of my employers’ systems, retraining is seamless, and culture is good.
During your next interview with a job hopper, ask them why they are moving around, why they changed, their career goals. Maybe it'll be a move, family, promotion, room for advancement, hard times, pay bumps, poor leadership, a tough manager, or a lack of recognition. Whatever the reason, and no matter your choice, take on board the reverence, honesty, dignity of a person and foster within that conversation a new way to do business. A way forward where a clear path for advancement exists, where managers are trained, developed & held accountable. Celebrate honest people, bring loyalty to your teams. Foster a new environment, where you can retain the top talent, while building a career professional into your organization.
The higher the stress - the more that's required outside of the 40-hour work week - the more you should be expected to pay to retain your talent. Step outside of your comfort zone and realize that fostering an understanding of the "Culture Iceberg," may lead your organization in the direction of success in retaining your millennial workforce. At the end of the day, millennials are people - supercomputer users, hardworking, focused, energetic producers, people people, that we need to push forward toward our succession plans. If you thought the millennial is a tough cookie, just wait for Gen Z. Technology shapes our future, history shaped our past, the current state of everything relies on your understanding of both.
