March 2008 – Don’t miss out on the employee-who-never-was

Companies are facing pressure just now to cut back on their graduate recruitment during the summer. Some recent reports have predicted big reductions in graduate intakes.

This often happens in a recession and it is usually a mistake. For a start there is no recession - yet - although many financial commentators seem to be doing their best to talk their way in to one. I really do believe that some will be disappointed if the financial system proves robust enough to overcome the current credit crunch.

But a downturn in house prices and tighter lending policies do not mean that the UK is in recession. On the contrary they could be good news in the long run, forcing prudence among borrowers and possibly easing the supply of houses for first time buyers. In a healthy labour market people must feel confident enough to move and they cannot do so if they are chained to their desks in order to service heavy debts.

Sensible levels of recruitment are healthy too. Companies that cut out a cohort of employees tend to find themselves depleted when business improves. It’s important in maintaining a balance of people for employers to have a distribution of age groups progressing through their ranks.

Age diversity is just as important as other forms of diversity as a company moves to maturity. It is natural that some people will move jobs and there will always be a need to recruit from outside the business. Not even the civil service can fill all of its needs from inside as it once did.

But the key to effective workforce management is to maintain flows of able people moving through the system, while maintaining sustainable levels of staff turnover and recruitment. Turning recruitment on and off like a tap betrays potentially damaging short-termist behaviour.

It’s difficult to assess the fall-out from such knee-jerk management, however, as companies seek more transparent explanations when their business is not doing as well as they hoped. You can’t measure something that does not exist – such as the benefits that might have been gained from the employee-who-never-was.

But this year, I suspect, much more is riding on decisions over the recruitment of young people. To ignore the younger workforce today could have repercussions for years to come, for the simple fact that youth is a dwindling resource in the UK and elsewhere in Western Europe.

A demographic tightening of supply should be good news for older workers since there is likely to be more work to share around in the long run. It’s good news, also, for women returning to the workplace after raising their families, since they will have greater bargaining power to demand more flexible working arrangements in future.

It should, indeed, be good news for young people although the greater numbers passing through university means that competition among potential recruits remains fierce for so-called “graduate jobs.”

Companies, however, cannot afford to be complacent about a strong supply of graduates, partly because it masks a shortage of other young people in the labour market. Overall supplies are going to go down in future. A City & Guilds report two years ago was forecasting increasing labour shortages in the next decade as fewer young people entered the jobs market. Little has changed in the interim to confound that prediction.

What companies do need to be aware about, however, is the influences shaping the attitudes to work among young people, and the way these attitudes vary depending on national and cultural background.

A recent report, Young People Facing The Future, based on a survey of close to 23,000 people in 17 countries, discovered broad differences in young people’s attitudes to work, depending on their nationality. Most of those surveyed were in the 16 to 29 age range with proportion in the 30-50 age range so that responses between age groups could be compared.

The study found evidence, for example, of much more conformist attitudes among young people in France and Italy, than those in Nordic countries. Some 54 per cent of young French adults agreed with the statement that “to have a successful career you must conform to the expectations and wishes of others.” Only 26 per cent of young Britons endorsed that statement.

Not only are the young British less conformist, the study found they were less enamoured with conventional work than the French. While 70 per cent of the French sample said they believed a fulfilling job could deliver a happy life, no more than 43 per cent of young British adults said the same.

But French conformity should not be interpreted as optimism; far from it. Only one in four young French adults thought that their personal future looked bright. In the UK the proportion was just over one in three while in Denmark nearly 60 per cent of those questioned were optimistic about their personal futures.

Anna Stellinger, director, Economic and Social Research at the Fondation pour l'innovation politique, who headed the research, believes these results reflect the different employment systems in various countries. Jobs in Scandinavia and the UK, where job protection is weaker than in France, are much more accessible to young people as a result, she says.

Young people in France, she says, believe there is less they can do as individuals to alter the course of their lives. They feel they have less freedom and control over their careers.

A general observation in the research which counters some existing beliefs about the latest generation of young adults, was that collective structures were still important to young people. Belonging to a group remains a significant concern.

Why should these findings matter to recruiters? They matter because they tell us two things: the first is that the attitudes of young people are shaped by the society in which they are raised and educated; the second is that, fundamentally, for all their national differences, young people share much the same priorities about their careers.

Interesting, meaningful work was the highest priority of all, cited as the number one concern for 70 per cent of those questioned. Second on the list of priorities was personal health, third was security, fourth, a sense of pride in the job, fifth was good colleagues, sixth a good boss, and seventh, good career opportunities. A high salary was down at eighth in the career wish list. Travel opportunities, fixed working hours and jobs with lots of responsibilities were less highly rated.

The study would suggest that employment and education policy makers in the UK are doing a better job of shaping the future workforce than their French counterparts. But more needs to be done to create better workplace opportunities to match the aspirations of all young people. One of those changes may be to review the hallowed status of the graduate job. After all, any job performed by a graduate is a graduate job, isn’t it?

In the meantime companies need to be shaping their recruitment programmes to meet the needs of young people, not closing their doors in fear of recession.

Young People Facing the Future, an International Survey, is published by Fondation pour l’innovation politique, price Euros 10.

See also: Leading career web sites