It might be time to reconsider the definition of “working holiday.” Right now, it’s an idea reserved for people who leave permanent jobs in Canada and move to Europe, Australia or elsewhere to temporarily wait tables or labour under the sun between sight-seeing trips.
But there might be a chance to update “working holiday” for people beavering away in their careers. After all, many international companies move employees from offices on one continent to offices on another. The international experience helps companies develop young talent, and gives the young talent a reason to stay with the company over the longer term.
Take Jason Winkler, the head of accounting firm Deloitte’s consulting business in British Columbia and head of human resources for Deloitte Canada, for instance. “I grew up in the firm, and I’ve been with it for 20 years – that might come as a shock to most gen-Yers,” Winkler says. And why did he stick with the company so long? “I’ve had so many different jobs in the course of those 20 years, that it’s actually like I’ve changed firms multiple times, which actually does appeal to our gen-Ys and millenials.”
According to a 2010 report from the Pew Research Center, millenials are most likely to change jobs and careers, partly as a result of that demographic’s younger age. According to the survey, roughly two-thirds of the working gen-Yers believe they will change jobs or employers compared with about half of gen-Xers and a third of the baby boomer generation.
Some of that is attributable just to the age group. “Millenials are also job hoppers, not surprising because most of them will be working at least three more decades,” the report states. “Members of this generation are far more likely than members of others to say they will one day be working for someone other than their current employers.”
That wasn’t the case for Winkler, who started with Deloitte in the early 90s at the company’s Ottawa office, where he met a Thai accountant working in Canada on a secondment. “I thought, ‘If that can happen out of a relatively small Ottawa office, then maybe I should give it a try.’” Less than two years later, Winkler was on a Hong Kong-bound flight for a two-year assignment.
Ernst and Young also offers its employees the chance to work in offices in foreign countries. Outside the accounting world, lawyers and financial analysts can get similar chances to move around. So too, do personnel in major oil companies like Shell Canada and major engineering and construction firms. In fact, companies with international offices use their reach to retain young workers looking for a chance to get away.
“We encourage people to go different places,” Winkler says. “The primary driver comes from our client but the clear and important ancillary benefit is actually professional development and growth and learning.”
The same Pew Research Center study found that among the gen-Yers who see their current jobs as either a “stepping stone” or a “springboard” to the next step in their career, 61 per cent intend to change employers. At the beginning of his career, Winkler might have felt the same way.
Since that initial flight to Hong Kong however, he’s had the chance to work in a number of other countries, including China, India, Iran, the U.K., the States and others. Part of what Winkler has enjoyed so much about his career is the number of different roles he has worked in with the company. In fact, he was one of five Canadians sent to Hong Kong to build up the consulting practice there in the early ’90s. While there, he was sent on a two-week trip to India to meet with senior people in industry and government for a report on how telco companies like Nortel could penetrate the Indian market.
Overall, the experience proved invaluable. Winkler says that of the five Canadians on that flight to Hong Kong, four are still with the company and have all taken senior leadership roles with the firm. Winkler himself is the chief human resources officer for Deloitte Canada – which employs 9,000 people. In that role, Winkler intends to keep attracting gen-Yers by offering flexibility and mobility, letting staff move to foreign offices. It’s part of a wider strategy that seems to work: the company attracted 19,000 campus job applications last year.
“In the past, companies would say, ‘Thou shalt go,’ and off you went. Now it’s a much more collaborative discussion,” Winkler says. “We have an internal system related to our performance management where every different employee in the firm can check a box and say, ‘I’m interested in mobility.’ They have a chance to actually declare whether they have an interest in it.”
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There is no shortage of information on how to find a job, and no absence of people willing to charge you money in order to help you look for one. But quitting a job? That’s an area in which you’re effectively on your own.
When you combine that with a culture that reveres celebrities and rewards spectacles, you get decisions like the one former CTV journalist Kai Nagata made last summer. The twenty-something didn’t just decide to quit the job that he’d been working at for less than a year. No, he decided that he would tell everyone precisely why he was quitting, in minute – and, frankly, excruciatingly narcissistic – detail. “It was what I would qualify as a ‘great job,’ he wrote, “especially for a 24-year old. Many of you told me how proud you were of my quick climb. But there was a growing gap between the reporter I played on TV, and the person I really am and want to become.”
There was more than just this familiar brand of intolerable self-involvement. He also took some clear shots at his former employer, and indeed the entire media establishment, for what he saw as its sins against the truth. “As a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out.” Never mind the fact that this is, by definition, what a reporter is supposed to do. For Nagata, it was too much to bear. “I’m broke, and yet I know I’m rich in love. I’m unemployed and homeless, but I’ve never been more free. Everything is possible.”
Everything, that is, except another job in the mainstream media. Nagata’s star may well be on the rise right now – his message of self-involved sacrifice plays particularly well with nostalgiac Baby Boomers – it’s entirely possible that he’ll tire of standing on his soapbox at some point in his life. When he does, he may find that the soliloquy that earned him so much popular attention actually wasn’t such a great idea.
David Aplin, a veteran human resources expert and the founder of David Aplin Recruiting, says that he’s seeing more people burn bridges on their way out of a job than ever before. “Many of the Generation Y folks are, I think, inherently impatient for progress and promotions,” he says. “As a result there are more of them leaving jobs, and they don’t have the judgment that you get from being in the workplace for ten or more years.”
How to quit properly, then? Rick Harcourt, the president of Harcourt Recruiting, says that maintaining a sense of professionalism is the key. That means honouring the notice period, helping your successor find their feet and not checking out just because you’re looking forward to your new position. If you don’t, you might find that it will come back to haunt you down the road. “Most businesses are in small industries, small communities, and people talk to each other,” Harcourt says. “There are official references, but there are also tons of unofficial references that go on. Someone will call up someone in the same industry two jobs later and say ‘hey, this guy worked for you five years ago. What happened?’ That kind of conversation can interfere with jobs well into the future.”
He’s seen that happen first-hand, too. A few years back somebody that worked at his office – a recruiting firm, remember – decided to quit her job when both of the owners of the company were out of town. And rather than giving her notice to one of them, she gave it to one of her co-workers. When Harcourt tried to call her back – not to encourage her not to quit, but simply to find out why she’d left – she didn’t return his calls. At least, not right away. “A few years later she sent me an email asking to come back,” Harcourt says. “I just sent it to the other owner and said ‘here’s your joke of the day.’ It was one of those clear cases of bridge burning where you have no interest in rebuilding the relationship.”
And as for Kai Nagata’s supposedly heroic decision to quit a good paying job in order to prove a point about the shallowness of the media? Well, Harcourt says, there’s another dimension of heroism that Nagata may not have considered. “It’s heroic in that heroic things often involve great personal sacrifice.”
]]>By Jeremy Derksen
The radio crackles through a swirling white deluge: “Thirty seconds.” Those are two words warning avalanche techs that a charge is about to be detonated. It’s routine procedure for ski resort avalanche control, but the risks would make most of us nervous.
“We’ve got unstable weather, remote locations…the destructive forces of nature. And on top of that, we’re handling explosives,” says Troy Leahey, an avalanche forecaster at Revelstoke Mountain Resort in British Columbia. “Risk is a combination of probability, consequence and timing. We mitigate that as much as we can, but working in the industry for a while we become comfortable with the risks.” An element of personal, along with professional, risk not only comes with Leahey’s job – recognizing how to work with it makes him good at what he does.
Most of us won’t face the physical challenges or life-threatening conditions Leahey faces, but taking professional risks can be a good thing. Our instinct is to avoid risk. After all, too much risk could jeopardize your job, pension and house. Widespread corporate risk has undone financial institutions and rocked the global economy
But avoiding risk is impossible and, it turns out, unwise. Without it, business stagnates, careers stall. “Risk aversion can prevent us from looking at opportunities as they arise,” says Michael Ungar, a sociology professor at Dalhousie University, in Halifax. “As a result, we may jump too late rather than anticipate change.”
]]>You look for stars. You look for the makeup of artists who can have long lasting careers and who could be headliners. – Clive Davis
The man who launched the careers of Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith and Sean “Puffy” Combs could teach us all something about recruiting. He would probably concede, however, that finding great talent – whether you run a record label or a small business – isn’t what it used to be. Recruiting evolves, and fast. A decade ago, most companies posted ads in the newspaper, that soon-to-be-relic of a simpler time. Since then, a little thing called the internet (not to mention its social media offshoots) has changed the field of recruiting as much as it has changed the music industry. Predicting the future of recruitment is as difficult as predicting new ways that Kanye West can embarrass himself, but there are a few areas that job seekers and employers should watch in 2010.
Number #1: The Recovery
Thanks to the recession, prepare for the biggest movement of resources in recent memory. The latest economic forecasts suggest that Canada’s recovery, unlike the recovery in the U.S., will not be “jobless.” The sheer mass of unemployed, under-employed and others who have parked themselves in their current jobs to wait out the tough times mean that 2010 will still be an employer’s market.
That said, some companies will have turnover at levels they have never seen, let alone prepared for. The depth and scope of job cuts during the last 18 months means that the spike in turnover will be higher than other recent downturns. Forecasting when the turnover will peak is difficult, which means that employers should look at how to retain key staff – the ones holding the company together – so they have their strongest employee base when the recession is truly over. The good people are the first to move when times are tough.
Number #2: Look Long, Look Hard
Just because a recession is over doesn’t mean companies are going to spend more money to find people. Unlike the lavish spending in the early 2000s, access to capital will be tight – and the capital that is available will go toward projects that generate direct revenue. Some sectors such as healthcare and law enforcement require specific, highly trained workers, and companies in these areas will continue to recruit heavily. Most industries still don’t recognize recruiting as an integral long-term strategy to generate revenue, and this is unfortunate. Job seekers, therefore, will need to be able to prove their value upfront.
Number #3: Outsource This
As companies forego the overhead cost of rebuilding anaemic HR departments, the broader trend toward outsourcing and “projectization” will affect recruiting. Job seekers should look to third-party and virtual recruiters for opportunities, not just directly to potential employers.
Number #4: Social Media Rules
Just because you’re sick of hearing about social media doesn’t mean you can ignore it. Twitter has already become a great way to find positions. The traditional post-and-pray tactic – post the job and hope the right person finds it – is more and more replaced by the prey-and-sell method of headhunters. Recruiters have recognized the power new online tools give them to reach a wider talent pool of candidates who are not actively looking. In 2010, more employers will catch on to social media’s greatest contribution: building relationships with candidates. Job seekers, meanwhile, will need to make it part of their search strategy. Some fields such as marketing and communications, for instance, may require you to master social media platforms to position yourself as an expert in your field.
Number #5: It’s Not Just Who You Know
Posting positions will still be an efficient way of finding interesting candidates. There is no significant difference between posting a job opening on an online board now and posting it in a newspaper or employment office a decade ago. While general online job boards may become extinct, niche job boards aren’t going anywhere.
Number #6: Next-Generation Management
Like job seekers, the next step for recruiters is to adapt to new tools. These new tools will need to include ways to track not only candidates who have are actively seeking work and have, but potential candidates who may not even know they are being targeted. Recruiters will need to become part-time sleuthes, often working with little upfront information about people who aren’t actively looking for a new job.
Number #7: Mobile Recruiting
The final trend is more of a shot-in-the-dark: recruiters will be trying to reach more and more Gen X and Yers and the oldest of the Digital Generation where they live: on their smartphones. Who knows when – or if – companies will eventually accept job applications from your iPhone.
]]>The Expert Panel
Murray Vines, Organizational Psychologist, Vines & Company Organizational Psychology, Calgary
On the Approach: They leveraged their network to locate the management resources they required – very effective. Between Spicer and Schuler, it sounds like a good combination in terms of a mix of skills and competencies.
Red Flags: Innovequity brought in voices of experience to temper the inexperience of youth, and that can work beautifully. Or, it can lead to a situation where they can’t understand each other.
Next Steps: They may be surprised how quickly they may have to ramp up for production once financing is in place. They may find suddenly, “My God, we need more people.” Have people start thinking, “Hey, that’s someplace I could see myself going to.”
Douglas Fletcher, Managing Principal (Edmonton), Osborne Contract Executives
On the Approach: It’s an excellent strategy to keep HR costs variable for as long as possible at any level in the enterprise. Almost everything can and should be a variable cost at this stage.
Red Flags: Such senior [hires] know what needs to be done and frequently like their independence. Make sure there’s a well-documented paper trail, even an electronic one. Even a start-up needs succession and people contingency plans.
Next Steps: As human resources and contract work increases, have a communications plan. More people and contractors doing more things increase the potential for gaps and overlap. No lone wolves!
Karen Hawitt and Kevin Neish, Partners, Knightsbridge, Human Capital Solutions, Calgary
On the Approach: They have ingenuity on their side, but we’re not sure of their long-term and short-term vision. What often happens with start-up tech companies as they build out is they tend to be operations/engineering centred, at the expense of sales/marketing. We don’t see a strong go-to-market strategy, and that’s critical.
Red Flags: Their business plan does not sufficiently address the organization, resources and costs associated with the human capital element. As the company takes off, they will have a workforce.
Next Steps: Do a gap analysis on the existing team and analyze their strengths and where the holes are. Then develop a plan identifying how to fill those holes.
]]>Innovequity founders Ben Bertrand and Mark Holtom pulled together $2.3 million in financing. They’re on the hunt again, and this time it’s for human capital.
Every investor Innovequity contacted had the same reaction to their innovative Geometric Construction machine: “Interesting idea. So, have you guys done this sort of thing before?” Ben Bertrand and Mark Holtom, the 20-something founders, had built and run their own businesses before, but nothing on this scale. They needed depth on their management team.
“We didn’t know who we wanted, but we knew what we needed,” says Holtom. Along with extensive business experience, they wanted someone who knew the construction industry and, Holtom adds, “someone who had credibility with investors and who could contribute to the strategic thinking of the company.” Not to mention someone willing to work for virtually no money.
Equity investor WebbCo International connected them with Sumex finance expert Greg Spicer, whose resumé included a stint at Winalta, a construction company. Their second find was Cameron Schuler, an executive-in-residence at TEC (Technology, Entrepreneur and Company Development) Edmonton. Schuler helps with financial forecasts, business procedures and building Innovequity’s strategy and ever-evolving business plan. Now Innovequity had both financial and human capital.
Pay-Per-Use: Innovequity pays $750 for one day with Cameron Schuler. “That’s a note that keeps on accumulating, and at our next equity raise, TEC Edmonton will take the highest valuation and convert our debt to equity,” Holtom explains. Say they use Schuler for 100 days. That’s $75,000. TEC then gets the equivalent of $75,000 shares in Innovequity.
Cash and Carry: Innovequity compensates financial exec Greg Spicer with a combination of cash and equity, tied to certain milestones and mutual expectations.
Our panel of experts weigh in on Innovequity’s approach to sourcing funds, point out red flags and offer suggested next steps
Innovequity’s Mark Holtom reflects on the project’s challenges, surprises and what he would do differently if he could go back in time.
HR expert Tammy Sturge of HR Transformations on what hiring and firing basics entrepreneurs should know.
Our roundup of useful links for start-ups from around the web
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Our round-up of useful links for start-ups from around the web
EPISODE 3
HR for Employers
www.hrmanagement.gc.ca/gol/hrmanagement/site.nsf/eng/index.html
Service Canada’s website is a clearinghouse for basic HR information like training, planning, payroll, along with handy links to government programs such as Temporary Foreign Worker and Canada Summer Jobs.
Industry Canada
www.strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_indps/bps/steps?file=que14e.txt
This section of Industry Canada’s “Steps to Competitiveness” resource offers a detailed online human resources diagnostic for newbie employers.
Workplace Skills Initiative
www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/workplaceskills/skills_initiative/index.shtml
This year’s Workplace Skills Initiative program to fund innovative demo projects at companies across Canada has closed, but mark you calendars for March of 2010 to try out for next year’s program.
Boost Your Hiring IQ
www.boostyourhiringiq.com
The title pretty much says it all. This is the online home of the HR expert and interview coach Carole Martin. You can also check out her book of the same name.
What was the most challenging part of the process?
Mark Holtom: It was scary because we didn’t know what – who or when – was going to come. The people we needed weren’t the types of people who were part of our immediate day-to-day networks. We had to work to find them. Then, the best people, the people who have the experience we wanted, they are sought after. We had to stay on them, but walk that line of not being annoying. When we found them, we had to find a way to compensate them fairly – not easy to do when you’re a cash-poor company and you want top talent.
What was the most frustrating aspect?
MH: Every bit of money that comes in wants something else on the management and oversight front. And when it comes to corporate governance – we’ve been talking about that with investors and lenders as well – it’s even more complicated. Reconciling it all is a time-intensive job.
What surprised you the most?
Ben Bertrand: Again, time, time, time. Everything took so much longer than I expected when we started.
If you were to do it over again, would you change anything?
MH: When Greg [Spicer] and Cameron [Schuler] started working with us, we should have done more managing up, so that they could more effectively manage down. We’ve been living and breathing this company for close to four years, we know it inside out, and they haven’t. They’re great thinkers, but it’s our responsibility to get them all the information.
What did you do right?
MH: When we first started talking with Greg, he said he had too many commitments. We decided to wait for him. That stalled us on some fronts, but he was such a good fit for us. We knew he was what the company needed.
What didn’t work?
BB: Thinking we could do it all ourselves. But we got over that pretty quickly.
Tammy Sturge of HR Transformations on what entrepreneurs should know about hiring, firing and staffing your start-up. [Via the MaRS Discovery District's Entrepreneurship 101 Lecture Series]
Human Resources Management from MaRS Discovery District on Vimeo.
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