The Green Age of Hiring
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Green these days is all about shades of the environment. Recycling. LEED certified. And carbon footprint surface to top-of-mind when thinking green. When the first Earth Day was celebrated in the last millennium who knew it would rewrite the Crayola box entirely?
We have entered the Green Age, ironically when estimates are that one in eight people nationwide have lost their jobs and have no green income to maintain even a pared-down lifestyle.
Last week, Unleaded Group interviewed a candidate for an open web programming/design position. With a nine-year track record under his belt, the 20-something applicant announced that he expected to earn $85k annually plus benefits.
Sound a little like Back To The Future?
I followed a Twitter exchange between a handful of web programmers/designers laid off from an Internet development company in mid-March only to confirm that indeed youth is wasted on the young. For the most part, they launched their Internet careers when green meant a wad of Benjamins as random as the bonuses paid on Wall Street. This particular Twitter solution to being unemployed was to meet at a local hangout and hide in a hangover.
In a short-lived email exchange with a young lady who came highly recommended for the same open position, her ballsy response smacked of naïveté. Before scheduling an interview mano-a-mano, she wanted to know the company’s business plans and a salary range for the position.
Across the board, industries are reporting their business is on average 30 to 35% off prior years performance. To those who haven’t yet weathered difficult economic times, the lessons to be learned are manifold. And yet the X and Y generations that grew up on the immediacy of microwaves and emails won’t get it for months to come that hiring in trying economic times means showing up with something you, as an employee, can contribute to the job…not just take away.