The Big Game Hunter

I'm going to talk with those of you who are involved with hiring. And I'll start by saying, I worked in search for more than 40 years, and filled more than 1200 full time positions, plus consulting assignments. I now coach people, so I'm not you're trying to sell you recruiting business. What I'm here to do is to offer some very simple advice in a no BS kind of way because your hiring managers are screwing themselves out of their ignorance and their bigotry. So, there are a number of different groups that could be interviewed and could be hired and do great work for you.
I'll start off with the one group that, time and again, delivers results but for many of your managers, they're worried about nonsense. That group is older workers --seniors, individuals who are close to retirement age, whatever that means these days. They are generally older than the hiring manager and the story they tell themselves is that these people will not take direction, they're burned out tired has-beens. That's a simple way of putting it, right?
And it's a lie that they're telling themselves and you and HR needs to confront it because you're staring at productivity issues. You're staring at them, complaining that they're not seeing enough people and demographics are such that they can take 22 year olds from Gen Z who have no experience. They can do that. Their work ethic is very similar to the older generation.
I'll simply say that, you know, the studies that I've been seeing point to Gen Z as being like a clone of the Baby Boomers in terms of their work ethic. So what's the issue with the Boomers? if you're liking Gen Z, the Boomers actually have experience, they will take direction and they'll work hard. They're not rushing out to retirement because they can't afford it. So, that's one group that you're hiring managers should pay attention to.
Another one, for certain types of positions, are ex-offenders. You know, people who've been incarcerated. Now ex-offenders, as long as they're involved with social services, as well, will work very hard, do a lot of good work. They need certain types of training, and then they need certain types of supports in your organization. But it's a population that gets ignored and often can do jobs that you really need people to do because these are not people who've been trained for accounting and finance or technology. They are labor for a lot of your organizations. Don't neglect ex-offenders, even if you have to pay to train them because once they've trained, they will be loyal.
The third group is moms who are returning from maternity or raising kids, for that matter. This is a workforce that wants to work, has decided that they're ready to work and there are a lot of jobs that they can do and, as an HR professional, you need to fill jobs, right? And your hiring managers want very simple behaviors out of people. What's the cost of training to get someone up to speed on things that they did before? Not all that expensive believe it or not.
I don't care what field this person worked in. They can do the job with a certain amount of training. You can also, if you're paying for training, get them to commit to work for your organization for a certain period of time or be obligated to pay the firm back for that training. It's not difficult. Just don't go crazy with . . . "You have to work for us for three years or else you will have to pay us back."
Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Don't do that kind of crap. Just amortize it out over the course of a year. If they leave the within the year. They owe you the money back.