Want To Engage Gen Y? Start By Calling Them Something Else

// September 22nd, 2009 // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

g-generation-y I’ve spent this week introducing our managers to our graduate marketing program. It’s a program that has been hand-built by me and a very dedicated team of designers and developers. It’s frankly awesome.
In nearly every meeting, these managers (who are largely technical types) have asked if the way we communicate – personal, informal, friendly – is a “Gen Y thing”. Because, you know, Gen Y love that stuff. And at every opportunity, I’ve taken pains to point out that no, it isn’t. It’s a people thing.
The people we want (and I suspect this applied to you too) don’t like being generalised. They don’t like being categorised. They like being individuals. They like having this recognised, too. People respond well to being singled out for the things they pride themselves on. In other words, people respond well to being recognised as a person.
Those Generation Y’s that managers are always complaining about have a reasonable point to make. As long as you keep seeing them as a generation, and not as individuals, you’re alienating them. Every person within generation Y has the same level of individuality in communication style, work preference and background as anyone else. They are as susceptible to cold, hurt, excitement, honesty and fear as anyone else.
Generations are a way of making broad classifications. They are a way of seeing. And every way of seeing, is a way of not seeing. If you continue to define people by their generation, you paint them with the ‘average’ of their collective public perception. You brand them based on the collective psychological impression the chronological group they belong to has given you. In short, you marginalise their humanity right from the start.
Need something to call your new graduates? Try their names.