In an effort to find an employee with prized hard skills and technical competencies, Bob innocently overlooked a major soft skill – one he later found hindered success and even became damaging to the entire team. It has happened to the best of us when hiring millennials. In hindsight, Bob was angry about his decision to hire this employee because as he reminisced on the initial interview, it was clear the questions he asked were focused on hard skills. Unfortunately, that 4.0 GPA suddenly wasn’t faring so well.
None of his interview questions took into account the soft skill typically known as a positive mental attitude. This generation of emerging professionals is notorious for their hard skills, but now even more so, for their lack of real world experience and the needed soft skills like resilience, problem solving and interpersonal skills, that enable them to thrive in workplace culture.
As experts have dug deeper to understand this generation’s workplace difficulties, we have learned that 60 percent of employers feel their young employees aren’t prepared for the workplace. It’s not due to a lack of internship involvement or because their resume isn’t robust enough. College hasn’t prepared students for the workplace as it was intended to and as a result, students graduate with adequate hard skills, but subpar soft skills. It’s the “Young Employee Dilemma” that’s creating a gap between potential and performance.
How can we fix this? Mentoring
We need millennials for their innovation, passion and technology know-how. We must now focus our interviews on teach-ability, our onboarding process on training them well and our daily objective on creating a virtuous alignment in a multi-generational workforce.
Mentoring gives young professionals the opportunity to talk candidly and learn from someone older and more experienced, in a relaxed environment. It’s important to identify the soft skills that are lacking in each new hire in order to pair them with a mentor who has soft skills you want transferred to the new hire.
Start small, and with a commonly neglected soft skill. For example, making a positive first impression is easy, but a lasting impression? This is a matter of social intelligence – a soft skill business leaders often report is missing in their young team members. They’ve succeeded in landing the job, but once they settle into it, they fail to uphold that same level of professionalism and maturity – gossiping about colleagues, showing up late and displaying their general lack of job etiquette.
Simple mentoring steps to develop young professionals:
- Select a group of influential workplace veterans who can meet with your young professionals on a weekly basis.
- Host an initial meeting with them to cast your vision for developing them and this much-needed soft skill.
- Discuss one topic each week, igniting conversation on social intelligence. Some potential ideas are social cognition, self-presentation and influence.
- Celebrate the training’s completion, and invite each employee to mentor new staff themselves. Mentoring becomes a methodical part of your onboarding process and young employees feel like a valued and needed member of the team.
Just like anything else, if you want a return on your investment, you have to actually make smart investments. If you want your young employees to grow, you need to develop them. Companies that empower the use of mentors are finding and retaining the best millennial professionals. Believe in your young talent and allow them to falter, but when they do, coach them toward growth.
