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Sixty-one percent of CEOs experience difficulty recruiting and integrating younger employees, making the "millennials" who are currently entering the workforce the second biggest talent challenge.
"We're doing a lot of thinking at the moment about how we handle workforce flexibility and the different requirements of the various generations that comprise our staff."
Ralph Norris
CEO
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia
Clearly, there is a need for CEOs to better understand the professional priorities of younger workers. PricewaterhouseCoopers decided to try to fill this information gap by surveying its incoming millennials—more than 4,000 graduates from 44 countries who had been offered jobs with the firm.
Although the results give us a good insight into the views of new graduates from around the world, they are clearly not a proxy for the entire millennial group. It should be noted that there were many similar responses across the globe, which suggests that executives should take notice.
Some responses matched CEOs' expectations. Training and development, particularly through mentoring, was the top benefit most respondents wanted in addition to salary, which CEOs seem to understand. In this year's Global CEO Survey, 61 percent of CEOs said that they were working with universities to tailor education programmes and 77 percent said that they were redeploying employees within their organisations.
We also found that the expectations of millennials and CEOs differ. The most popular people strategy among CEOs is creating more a flexible working environment. Yet, in terms of working hours, most of PwC's millennials do not expect flexibility.
There seems to be an even greater disconnect between tactics and expectations over corporate social responsibility. Sixty-six percent of CEOs say that providing opportunities for employees to get involved in socially responsible activities is key to attracting talent. But only 7 percent of the graduates we surveyed wanted time off for doing social or charity work as one of their top three benefits.
Does this show a lack of commitment, or are millennials the first generation to believe that social responsibility is inseparable from business? Despite their unwillingness to take time off, 86 percent of our survey group would consider leaving an employer whose corporate behaviour no longer met their expectations.
These disconnects suggest that better profiling of diverse workforces is essential to understand what drives employee loyalty and behaviour. Businesses should segment their workforces more carefully, just as they do with their customers, to ensure that they offer the most appropriate benefits to employees at different stages of their career.
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