A new focus for recruiters: What about the boomers?
Newly Corporate is a member of the US News and World Report Career Blog Network “Outside Voices“. Each of the authors here at Newly Corporate post on the blog in a rotating schedule, one post total each week. Here is this week’s post by Jamie Timms:
It seems all of the workplace and development has been about millennials, the unknown blip on the radar. Companies, authors, and cities have been researching, prodding, and marketing to a group that has stunned them all—because marketplaces and workplaces are rapidly evolving and the millennial mind-set is at the helm, even though we’re not the captains of the ship.
As a marketing and communications person, I’ve faced the challenge of marketing to my generation. It’s an odd thing trying to identify the motives of an audience you’re so close to, without having a bias. But thankfully I’ve had some help—our team tapped a nationally recognized young professionals consultant, Rebecca Ryan, who has helped us research and develop a strategy that we’re currently implementing to attract talent to the Columbus, Ohio, region. We’ve connected young professionals to each other, to major players in the community, and created a Web-based relocation tool that will assist area employers in recruiting employees of all ages to Columbus. The millennials, or “young professionals,” as we call them, have the attention of our mayor and our business community—from local law firms to Fortune 500 companies.
But as fast as millennials came on the scene, the obsession with their place in our workplace is fading, and the boomers are back. The new focus is the boomers and how we can repurpose them in the marketplace.
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I am a boomer…There are two sites that recruiters have found me and call me:
http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.realmatch.com
Its nice to be wanted.
I think you have to make a splash. You need a big, bright, crazy differentiators. You want people to say, “you can only get that if you work for the city”. One thing that would work for me (and my old man) is more vacation time. Or the ability to trade pay for more time off. I think you could have a tag line like, “work for the city, get your life back”. Just hammer on the work/life balance stuff.
It is always like this at the end of high economical cycles, the markets turn down to new to get the values that are on the markets… Millenium time will come again.