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More On Millennials and Work

As a follow-up to yesterday’s much-read post about Hiring Millennials, here’s an e-mail from a friend who works in public policy research, posted with his permission. Ellipses in the original: Rod – was rushing yesterday and still today so didn’t have a chance to comment on your blog…..but I have repeatedly heard the same thing […]

As a follow-up to yesterday’s much-read post about Hiring Millennials, here’s an e-mail from a friend who works in public policy research, posted with his permission. Ellipses in the original:

Rod – was rushing yesterday and still today so didn’t have a chance to comment on your blog…..but I have repeatedly heard the same thing from business owners in various cities across the country over the past year. I’ve written a couple things on this too which I’ll dig up if I can find. But bottom line is there seems to be a similarity of experience among boomer-age business owners that millennials are less ambitious but expect more to just fall in their laps….which is esp weird given the economy. As one guy who’s run a biz for 25 years put it to me: These days, the first questions of people we interview are when does the day end, how much time off do they have, what are the benefits like, when is the first raise…but no one asks what it takes to succeed or seems prepared for questions we ask about what they would do to make the biz better, etc. Haven’t seen any polling data on this but I hear this a lot….

We had an e-mail exchange, and he added:
I know a guy here in town who buys and sells companies and has done really well. He tells me that it’s not the blue collar jobs they have a hard time filling, it’s the white collar jobs where they need college grads who can do the basics of doing presentations to clients, managing follow up with them, etc. He scratches his head out loud about why what used to be fairly straightforward has become so difficult.
Thoughts?
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