When I first read this, I too was a little shocked at some of his assumptions and I’ve blogged time and time again on my Generational Recruiting blog right here on ERE that from ’study’ to ’study’ the generalizations differ greatly.

My solution to either reading or writing about the generations is to be familiar with Millenials attributes but don’t let that shape your view of them. Draw your own conclusions with each individual candidate. Especially since not every Millenial has a sense of entitlement. That’s a harsh assumption to make on all of them.

I simply should not have penned my post while tailing off a courtesy interview with a candidate referred by my client (and why aren’t any of those ever any good?; there’s an article topic in there somewhere…) as my pilot corkscrewed into Tuzla.

Although I am apparently too sleep-deprived to have found and read a calendar yesterday, I stand by my original point about the danger of predicting the character and workplace behavioral tendencies of any candidate born from 1980 through 1994 through the application of pop culture-derived generalizations.

Gotta run. The phone’s ringing, and I can’t find my airsickness bag.

However, I think that the advice in this article is not targetted at Recruitment professionals - it’s way too basic. Maybe there’s some HRA’s out there that may find this useful but I’m not sure.

The advice itself is quite contradictory.

Bill you say you need to ‘Try delving deeper:’ but then suggest some very tired old questions like:
‘Where do you see yourself in two/five/10 years? Explain how you’ll get there.’
‘What do you expect to get out of this job?’

These questions have been around for so long. They’re not behavioural & don’t provide useful info for any group of candidates - not only Millennial.

It’s worth refelcting that there’s two separate & quite different processes involved here, recruitment & selection. This article is about the second & selection is a whole different & difficult area to be giving advice on.

Recruitment is creating a pool of qualified candidates to go forward into the selection process.

Selection is about identifying the candidate with the best future ‘on the job’ performance.

?Asians are known for their exceptional intellect, a direct result of the value their parents place on educational achievement.?

The author of a statement like this would suggest that if you were interviewing Quynh-Anh Lam, whom you’d never before met, you could predict she would be likely to be more intelligent than ‘the norm’ simply because he or she was of Vietnamese origin. You, being the enlightened soul you are, would dismiss this as, at best, a ridiculously broad and therefore valueless generalization and, at worst, a racial stereotype (same thing, really).

Similarly, to claim that one can predict the values or workplace behavior of any individual candidate on the basis of the year he or she was born is as valid as the other ?science? that predicts behavior based on birth year: astrology.

Millenials I’ve worked with recently include a woman I placed a month ago into a senior procurement role who was annoyingly loyal to the Fortune 50 employer she’d joined right out of business school in the early 90’s, and a 1992 Naval Academy and Harvard Business School graduate whose interest in my search was summed up in the comment, ‘It pays way better than what I’m doing now, and the commute is 8 miles versus 50.’

The ‘Millenial’ generation includes Paris Hilton and Michael Monsoor. One is a waste of space, the other is one of the greatest heroes in American history.

But maybe they both ‘multitask’ well.

As a recruiter I was taught to gather evidence of past performance through asking behavioural interview questions, and then validating these responses through reference checks from previous managers who had observed the candidate’s performance?

If someone has research that supports the proposition that candidates’ opinions align with their subsequent job performance I’d be keen to read it.