Millennials struggle to overcome stereotypes to find employment.

Nexxt, a recruitment media company, announced findings from a national survey conducted among 6,000 job seekers and veteran HR professionals, finding that Millennials (Generation-Y) have a pretty serious image problem.

According to the Nexxt survey, while over 84% of Millennial job seekers (age 19-26) are optimistic about finding employment, there are substantial differences in how they view themselves and how HR Professionals perceive them in a variety of categories, including: work ethic, leadership skill, and technological expertise, among others. Most strikingly was the issue of loyalty, where only 1% of HR Professionals felt Millennials would remain faithful to their employer over the long-term. By contrast, 82% of Milliennials self-identified as loyal – underlining the chasm that exists between younger job seekers and HR Professionals that tend to be from later generations.

“Feelings….nothing more than feelings…” 

The song “Feelings”, written in 1974 and performed by many artists since that time, is running through my head as I pen this post. And now, with the addition of some new “human capital emotional monitoring tools” that have recently hit the market, perhaps HR professionals and business owners will soon be singing the same tune.

As the world continues to capitalize on the explosive use of mobile devices by building apps that make you look pretty or help you make your friends look fat, innovation in the HR space is no different. Two recent
tools to hit the scene, emooter.com and morale.me, are hoping to help HR professionals better gauge the mood of their employees.  A third, called happi.ly, is rumored to be coming out later this year. 

Basically, the way these tools work is pretty simple. As an HR administrator, just download the app or log in to the web site, set up the administrator account, and invite your employees to participate. Employees then can click a smiley face or frowny face, or use a slider bar and tell the app how their feeling about their job. Your employees can do this real time and as many times a day as they desire. This data is then aggregated from all of the participating employees across the company and can be used to get a real time pulse on how your employees are feeling. Think of it as an electronic mood ring for your employees. Clever.