Tag Archives: hiring

Good blog, John. Per studies, money is well down the list of reasons for employee retention. If I’m not mistaken the employees relationship with their direct manager is #1, followed by other factors such as company culture, ability to learn, their passion for the company mission, etc. So retention boils down to doing some tough work around making your workplace an appealing place to come every day, rather a place to dread. That’s not as easy as it sounds, for a small business person who focuses on meeting his payroll.

This has been happening in Australia for a while John. We have the whole new situation of rising unemployment combined with increasing skills shortages. The new catch cry is that we are ‘warehousing’ our youth in educational facilities that don’t produce workforce-ready employees. To make it worse, out minimum wages here are US $16.37 an hour. Plug that into the payroll of a USA small business and see what happens!!!

I need to take a deep breath before replying because there is some truth in what your are saying, but there is also fault to the logic. It might just be the title that rubs me wrong.

We have had trouble hiring recently. There are literally a hundred or more applicants for each position, and few are actually qualified. However, these aren’t even for entry level jobs – we are requiring a minimum of 3-5 years of experience for most positions, and they STILL aren’t qualified. I think that this is because most SMBs can’t or don’t provide proper entry level training. My own management team even came to the realization that we were not in a position to hire recent grads, due to a combination of our lack of internal training resources and the cost/lack of availability of those resources externally. So my business is admittedly perpetuating the problem. So on the point at colleges aren’t preparing students adequately, I agree, but I think both colleges and businesses need to adjust.

Now on to the point about passion. When I was headed to college, my dad pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to study. A straight A student, I replied, “a doctor or lawyer, and I’m leaning toward law.” I’ve never seen such a look of disappointment on his face. To everyone, including myself, I was an artist. I had always loved art and excelled at it in school and in competitions. He asked why I didn’t plan on studying art and my response what that my art teachers warned us not to wind up as “starving artists”. One of my favorite teachers recommended that I study business if I wanted to be an artist. My dad was then disappointed in my teachers and mentors. He hauled me over to the early-stage dial up Internet access that we had at home and managed to find a really cool chart showing income ranges for various professions. He showed me very wealthy and very poor salaries for each position. And then he asked, “where are you going to fall on this spectrum if you are doodling in the margins of your law books? Are you going to be one of the greatest lawyers?” He was right. I was meant to study art. I have an older brother who is a journalist. We have both “made it” in or professions and are at the top of our income categories, and I am thankful to my father for being so supportive of our dreams.

I don’t believe that passion and entry level job preparedness should be inextricably linked in this discussion. I can’t give up on the idea of self-actualization, but maybe those dreams do need to be tempered with encouragement to pursue a double major or minor in something that will help with the first few years out of college. If I had received a business degree, it certainly would have made entry level job searches less painful, and would have benefitted me in my role as a business owner. Maybe in 1996 that wasn’t as crucial as today. I think the caution is: let’s not overly stifle the passions of an entire generation and wind up with a well-trained entry level, and later, horribly mediocre working class.