You Should Hire Gen Xers – Part 1
The most common short explanation that comes to mind is experience. While experience is powerful and most likely the bulk of Gen X resume, the intangibles may be more important.
The first quality in current standards is the social aspect. The loudest voices that speak without thinking or speak in order to think appear to believe that social justice is something new. Something that nearly all Gen Xers know and understand is history. Gen X had it right forty years ago. As children of the 70’s and teens of the 80’s, an individual’s identity as defined today, did not matter. Before you get angry and quit reading, read this again and try to understand the description. It didn’t matter who you were.
Gen Xers did not see racism or dwell on hurting anyone to make themselves feel better. People were people. There were good people, bad people and many in between. Your skin color, your degree of wealth or poverty, your religious beliefs, your tendencies to be outgoing or reserved…these were not factors AT ALL in how you were perceived or judged. Simple unwritten rules were normal, such as “Live and let live”. Everyone was accepted and there were no exceptions. The Golden Rule was in play and required no spirituality – it just made sense (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you). Treat people the way you want to be treated. In other words, we did not demand anything of others that we ourselves were not capable of doing and willing to do. To the young, exuberant social justice warriors, Gen Xers heard you from your beginnings. The caution, or reservedness that many of us displayed was due in part to wisdom. Wisdom is hard to come by without time. Bringing people down or hurting people whose voices are not as loud as yours, whose skin color isn’t the same as yours or whose beliefs do not match yours is not equal to treating everyone the same. You catch more flies with honey than you do with…
Is experience and acceptance enough? What other benefits do Gen Xers bring to the table?
Spend a day, or a week, or a month scrolling through the digital job boards. Larger, older established businesses are hiring, of course. Many more small businesses and startups are also looking for talent. The most common factor in the job market that stands out is the independence and determination of the jobless and new employees who give no quarter to any company looking for talent. I applaud this job-hopping no-loyalty approach to building resumes out of quantity. Many Gen Xers may find these qualities and this approach surreal. Our resumes show ten, fifteen, twenty-five or more years with one company. We believed in loyalty to the company, and in return we were rewarded. Often our reward was not some financial windfall but rather security in the knowledge that our job was secure, our growth and climb up that ladder was achievable – if we wanted to get to the top. For those who just wanted to give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay that job security still existed. This quality, this loyalty, makes Gen Xers a smart investment still today.
Soft skills. In today’s world of instant gratification, giving or receiving empathy, patience, kindness or a general willingness to help is almost unheard of. For Gen Xers that worked in any industry that required satisfying customers to build customer loyalty, soft skills were ingrained in us. We learned first through osmosis as those that came before us used these people skills honestly – it was part of who they were. Those who landed careers with forward-thinking corporations were blessed with years of training. It may sound silly, but if you grew up in a digital age where talking to people was not as normal as texting or typing whatever you thought of into a social media conduit, you could be extremely uncomfortable when facing a situation that requires human interactions. Gen Xers were invested in and trained to interact with people using these soft skills.
As a hiring manager, a corporate policy maker or someone wearing multiple hats in a startup, consider this.
You can hire talent that is not loyal. They may be young, aggressive and bring fresh energy to a team. They could be long-term assets if you treat them well enough.
You can hire talent that will be loyal because loyalty is ingrained in their work ethic. You know up front that they will only be employed for one or two decades before retiring. They will bring not only experience but also the intangibles. You also know that they will be your employee for one or two decades, giving you your investment return.
You can hire a diverse mixture of both and reap all the benefits, including multiple generations of people learning from each other.
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