Tips To Creating A Balanced Work Force: There’s A Place For Both Baby Boomers And Millennials

In the race to recruit millennials to our companies, we often overlook older baby boomers who are readily available for employment and provide some important skills and character traits that millennials do not have.

There is a large pool of unemployed or underemployed baby boomers that were displaced by the last recession. As the economy has picked up steam, it seems that the collective corporate focus seems to be on doing everything possible to recruit millennials to the exclusion of older more experienced workers.

We have seen Google, McDonalds and a host of others relocate their corporate headquarters to city locations to be more attractive to millennials who prefer city life experiences to suburban ones. We have also seen corporate employee benefits specifically tailored to create a corporate culture that would be attractive to potential millennial recruits. While millennials certainly bring important skills to the workplace, baby boomers bring years of real world experience, logic and common sense and a work ethic that millennials have yet to develop. The value of these attributes should not be overlooked by your talent acquisition departments.

A company needs a balanced work force. Certain positions are better suited for millennial type workers (i.e. technology related positions); while other positions might be better filled by a more experienced baby boomer (i.e. finance/ accounting, human resources, operations/ production management). As you look to fill vacant positions in your own company, you will be well served to consider the many potential benefits of hiring from the baby boomer work force.