EightBlack.

A few years ago, if you visited Tom Peters website, you couldn’t access his famous slide presentations.

If you’ve never seen Peters live - then this is something you should do before they deem you too old to understand.

Sort of like saying you should see the Rolling Stones in concert before you die.

Now if you visit Tom Peters site, all his slide presentations are all there for you to access and download. A good portion of the actual slides wont make sense, but most of them will.

There’s a favourite of mine in there - and its this.

“Grovel To The Young”

Peters has been consistently ranting on about 2 key areas for ages - and that is now more than ever, if corporates are to succeed in the online world (or offline for that matter) then the recruitment of talent is critical.

As the slide says, he thinks we should absolutely grovel to the young.

The second thing that Peters is hysterical about is that most marketers are missing the most important element of all - the female market and the sheer influence women will continue to have on all major buying and marketing decisions.

But back to the youth market.

Employers are faced with the biggest challenge of all now.

How to keep generation Y engaged. It’s no longer good enough to pay them well. This market are more ambitious than ever, undertsand more about technology than we ever will and do not have any desire to stay and work at an organisation for anything more than 3 years.

Running a small consultancy practice like ours is relatively easy because I have direct contact with all our team.

But I feel sorry for large corporates (my old world) because while the immediate managers might be “tapped in” to what their team are thinking, in many cases they are powerless to change the environment.

And the leaders of these large corporates have no clue about the youth market (apart from struggling with their teenage kids if they have them).

They’re more concerned about implementing some $200 million dollar CRM system than trying to tackle youth marketing and talent retention.

I certainly know that in the online world, the biggest challenge we face is an acute talent shortage.

There’s never a shortage of good ideas. Just take a look at most cafes early in the morning. Some idealistic young person will be there, flipping through a powerpoint presentation to someone, hoping that what they are talking about will become the next Google, MySpace or Seek.

I know, I’ve sat on both sides of the table for a while now.

But there’s actually a bigger issue.

A good friend of mine in the US, Alex Mandossian is probably regarded as the best online conversion specialist there is.

He’ll freely talk about ideas, trends, his next big thing when most people would prefer he confided in only his inner circle.

But Alex gets it.

He knows that the bigger issue facing all of the online world is not the concepts themselves, but whether or not you actually have the skills to sell it.

And that’s the key.

While corporates can go out and pay virtually whatever they need to in order to hire talent, the challenge as an article in this morning’s Fin Review quite aptly put it, is being able to hire people who understand both the traditional world and the digital world.

Because it’s these people who can harness the energy that the youth market expel and turn it into revenue producing business channels.

When we hire now, I put no faith in people’s education, their background or experience (or lack of).

In the online world, we want people who have no preconcieved ideas about anything. Lateral thinkers. Programmers who relish the challenge in being able to do something when everyone else tells them its impossible.

The best advice I have for corporates now is that while the “war for talent” is far from over (some would argue that it hasn’t even begun) - the constant pursuit of young talent is now more critical than ever.

And this should be driven by the CEO. Not HR.

More importantly, the recruitment of people who can straddle both old world and new world are even more important to the mix.

It’s these people who can name their own price.

Finding them is another story.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 8:53 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.