Call us curmudgeons, but when accepted wisdom begins to dull the edge of a topic, we go looking for pins to stick in the balloon. Lately we’ve archived a slew of articles about the culture gap between Millennials (ages 18-29) and the rest of the universe.
This Millennial age group, the writers seem to concur, represents the vanguard of the human race and they are multi-tasking, social media-using, cell phone-addicted mutants whose peculiarities and special needs we will ignore at our peril. If we somehow fail to provide them with instant response, multimedia-enabled, nano-attention-span, group-validated inputs they will all crash and burn, taking our enterprises down with them.
Mastering Internet Recruiting - Job Seeker Attitudes and Behaviors
A good place to look for pins on this subject is the reports regularly published by the non-profit Pew Research Center. The Center’s researchers have been studying Internet usage for years producing extensive and reliable data, with no commercial axe to grind.
Pin #1 Did you know that blogging has been declining in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006, while by comparison, blogging within the overall adult Internet population has remained steady. Yes, the percentages are still different (15% vs. 11%) but it seems that the older Millennials get, the more they come to resemble...well, older adults. Go figure.
Pin #2 More teens (73%) now use social networks than any other age group and those numbers have been steadily rising since 2006. But guess what, the Luddites aren’t doing so badly either. In 2009, 47% of online adults did too, up 10 percentage points from a year earlier. The great digital divide isn’t between generations so much as it’s between social media enthusiasts and those who have something else to do.
Pin #3 (From our own surveys) Common assumption: The Internet job seeker audience is disproportionately young. Wrong again. It’s surprisingly balanced, roughly in thirds, across the age groups 21-30, 31-42 and 43-61. Only workers 62+ are disproportionately underrepresented.
Final pin How many teens use Twitter? Absolutely all of them, right? Well, all those flying thumbs from 12-17-year-olds flew from only 8% of that age group. By contrast, people seem to twitter more as they age. From 18-29, the less than 10% rises to one-third. (OK, I got this one wrong too.)
The point of these and our other curmudgeonly pins is to calm the nerves of overwrought recruiters who may be thinking, based on all the hype, that when it comes to our entry level workforce the medium is the message, and they don’t get the medium. Take heart. As the French have said for years, “plus ça change, plus ça dure,” the more things change, the more they stay the same. The message is still the message: build a rock-solid employer reputation, treat your people as the capital assets they are, write kick-ass job descriptions, and treat job candidates like human beings, not electronic trivia. Do this and ye shall prosper.
We’ll be reviewing more of Pew’s data and resurveying our own Internet audience this fall to update our two prior job seeker reports, which can be found in the store.
RELATED READING
Hodes Survey Reveals Social Networks as Viable Recruiting Source for Younger Workers
7 Questions You Wouldn’t Expect During a Millennial Interview
Three Questions to Ask Yourself About Millennials
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