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Employer Expectations: How to defy stereotypes vs. being defined by them
Editorial by Christian Saint Cyr
National Director / Canadian Job Development Network
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While stereotypes can take the form of genuine prejudice, often it is both the conscious and unconscious bias many people have. Stereotypes can also have an element of truth in them, even though it may not be true for everyone who falls in a particular group.
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For example, young people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, felt it was very important to be fiscally conservative, to encourage their children to pursue higher levels of education and to save for the future. While this isn't true for everyone of the hundreds of millions of people who had this shared experience, the financial, cultural, global and technological changes that occurred in this time period made it more likely people would respond this way.
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In the same manner, immigrants have a shared experience, regardless of what country they come from or whether they are a permanent resident or a refugee. Immigrants have been cut off from their culture, their family, their contacts and their accumulated understanding of how their society works. Now they are left trying to acclimate to the Canadian experience and while not everyone reacts the same way, we see similarities in how they respond whether they are from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America or even the United States.
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Persons with disabilities have the shared experience of trying to make their way in a world which often doesn't recognize or accommodate disabilities while Indigenous Canadians are trying to find a balance between their cultural heritage and modern Canadian society.
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For people outside of this context, who perhaps aren't immigrants, or have a disability; and are not Indigenous, we collectively develop expectations of these populations and in many cases they are not fair and can often be deeply prejudicial.
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For job seekers, they can't correct every unfair expectation an employer has, but they can defy those expectations which can sometimes be more powerful than if the employer had no expectations to begin with.
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Recently, ResumeTemplate conducted a poll of 1,000 hiring managers which found that 24% of the respondents believe Gen Z employees' behaviour cost them clients.
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Obviously, this is not a tremendous encouragement to hire young people. When these employers were asked what their top five customer complaints were, they included:
- Unprofessional tone
- Lack of attention to detail
- Being non-responsive
- Difficulty handling conflict
- Communication issues
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Do these sound like familiar Gen Z complaints? At one time, could they also have been Millennial complaints; or Gen X complaints; or even Baby Boomer complaints?
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Obviously, this generates a lot of concern among employers about hiring young people. When asked what their greatest concerns were, employers said:
- Unprofessional tone
- Lack of attention to detail
- Unwillingness to go above and beyond
- Lack of enthusiasm
- Tardiness
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In both cases, an unprofessional tone and a lack of attention to detail are big issues for employers. So, how do you suppose employers react when job seekers apply during their busiest periods; when there are mistakes in their resume; when they use a generic cover letter template; and when they apply the last hour and the last day a job is posted?
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Stereotypes are clearly unfair and yet when we train clients to recognize and address the stereotypes, they can really impress employers.
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What are the stereotypes employers have about mature workers? Is it that they are entitled; unwilling to start at the bottom; they cannot work with technology; and they will be hard to train? Mature workers can address all of these issues in their resume, cover letter, elevator pitch, LinkedIn profile and how they respond to interview questions.
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We often see lists as these as the insurmountable walls that employers put up to not hire our clients but instead it's a roadmap of what employers are looking for in their ideal job candidates. In fact the top five things employers are looking for in a young candidates based on their earlier responses include:
- Professionalism;
- An attention to detail;
- A willingness to go above and beyond;
- Enthusiasm; and
- Punctuality
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By the way, the big issues that employers are concerned about that didn't make the top five included (along with what employers are really looking for):
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Not taking responsibility for mistakes (takes responsibility)
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Poor time management (excellent time management)
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Poor problem solving skills (excellent problem solving skills)
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Being non-responsive (being accountable)
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Making avoidable mistakes (avoiding mistakes)
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While I've given you some examples for youth, this can be done for the stereotypes associated with any population. The easy part is incorporating this in a resume, cover letter or interview response. The hard part is getting your clients to integrate this into the work they will be doing.
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For hundreds of years, young workers have learned these skills through their first jobs and now it's getting exponentially harder to get those first jobs.
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In the career development sector, we need to spend much more time on life skills development; employer expectations; and creating strategies for success after the first day of work.
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We need to have hard conversations with our clients and students that if they don't embrace the culture of hard work and accountability that many employers expect, layoffs and firings, as well as the hardships that go along with them will be a repeated factor in their career.
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We’ll be discussing the reasonable and unreasonable expectations of employers at our #MotivatingMondays meeting of the Canadian Job Development Network, Monday Nov. 18th at 8:30am Pacific; 9:30am Mountain; 10:30am Central; 11:30am Eastern; 12:30pm Atlantic and at 1pm in Newfoundland.
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On the morning of Monday November 18th, 'Click this Link' to join the session LIVE.
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