This week on the Friday 15…
Andy & Brian talk about the skills necessary for new hires in B2B eCommerce and whether people just coming out of college possess those skills.
Plus, does a software company offer an answer to how you find recent grads who have the skills you need?
—
Brian Beck: Welcome to Friday 15 with Master B2B. Rocking out this morning as usual, my name is Brian Beck. I’m here with my partner in this Thought Leadership Series and Community Andy Hoar. Happy Friday Andy. Well, let’s get into our fun and exciting breaking news. What do we got? We have new music. That means I hit the wrong button. That’s what that means. So breaking news, Andy, we were in Atlanta this week. We had a roundtable with some fantastic folks in the middle of downtown, at Buckhead club. And we had just a wonderful discussion all about game changing B2B e-commerce activities, with companies like Napa Auto Parts, Kimberly Clark, Kloeckner Metals. We had just a great representation. It was a wonderful group, wonderful discussion, and shared some really practical insights into things people are doing. One of the most exciting or interesting discussions was around who should own the digital experience. And you know, it’s always– people always say, oh, it’s the customer. I think that’s a cop out, by the way. Yes, the customer is important. However, we need to also have someone in charge in the organization to take the customer’s input and make a decision about what to do. So it was an interesting discussion, Andy.
Andy Hoar: Well, I’ve heard in some of the roundtables I’ve facilitated, people have said the CEO. The CEO is the Customer Experience Officer? That’s just as bad as saying “the customer.” Are you going to have a meeting with the CEO?
Brian: Yeah, no. It was a great discussion. And I think the conclusion was, it can be different for different organizations. But yes, it does need to sit at a functional level at some point. But anyway, we’ve got a bunch more of these coming up. We’ll announce those as we get into it. But we’ve got a rich topic today. This topic is a follow-on from our discussion last week, which was all about return to office mandates. This week, we’re going to talk about how prepared are recent college graduates to work in B2B e-commerce. This is a hot topic, Andy. And one that we got a lot of interaction on LinkedIn when we posted this, a lot of folks voting about this. But it’s a serious issue. And let’s start by defining what we’re talking about. Who are these recent college graduates? Well, they’re millennials, right? They were born between 1981 and 2000. But more so now, these are Gen Z. And Gen Z is born 2021 to 2020. They’re the folks who are just starting to graduate college now. And this is a getting younger generation. And we’ve had this discussion before, Andy, about what’s the dynamic happening? The fact of the matter is that 63% are hiring from our research of B2B e-commerce leaders. What are they hiring? And for which roles? Well, we asked our community this in our recent research. And there’s things like product management, project management, merchandising, merchandising management, digital marketing, content specialists, even developers. AI development is another area. Analytics. So it’s across a lot of different roles. And you presume as a hiring manager, heck, this person is coming out. And they have a college education. And they’re presumably prepared for the workforce.
Andy: Well, let’s pause here for a second, because the first three positions you mentioned– all of the word management in them. And increasingly, that’s not necessarily managing people, per se, although there’s a dimension of that for sure. It’s mostly about managing processes, which also includes people, if we’re being fair. And what is key and absolutely fundamental to doing that? You have to be able to communicate with people. And you have to be able to hold people accountable. And you’ve got to be able to set expectations. These are required interpersonal skills, which is, I think, what we’re about to talk about has been the real struggle with Gen Z, in particular.
Brian: Yeah, for those of you watching, we’re sharing some information here from Grow Leads, which is a research organization. It says, B2B roles often focus on managing relationships between companies and complex buying processes. If we think about B2B, this is not as simple as selling a shirt in a store, for example. These are more complex buying processes, multiple levels, multiple roles. And so that takes some skills, things like relationship building, as you were alluding to, knowledge of the industry you’re getting into and working in. Strategic thinking, negotiating skills, technical expertise. These are the entry-level positions today, I think, are in some ways more demanding than they’ve ever been. Any thoughts on this, Andy?
Andy: Let’s throw a B2B filter on top of all of this stuff. This isn’t about selling somebody a t-shirt. It doesn’t fit. And then you have a chat robot answer for them, hey, sorry, man, we’ll send you a new one. This is about stuff like you order the wrong part. Or you have the wrong gloves. I was talking to somebody yesterday who was a distributor of gloves. And if you don’t use the right gloves in the right clean room environment, you can contaminate it and cost millions of damage. So there’s a little margin for error, very little margin for error here. And I would say even back up on this industry knowledge thing for a moment, you have to have interest in it, period. B2B companies that we talk to, we say, hey, we’re not sexy. We make hydraulic equipment or whatever. They can’t get anybody in Gen Z – ot only to have industry knowledge – but to have interest in getting industry knowledge. And so there’s a dimension of that that makes B2B even more complicated, more difficult with younger generations. Because who grew up thinking, hey, let’s go look at some hydraulic lifts this afternoon. And especially for people who don’t grow up in those areas, where they even see some of this equipment, they graduate from college. Maybe they grew up in a suburban environment. Somebody says, hey, we’re a $5 billion company that manufactures, again, electrical capacitors. What’s an electrical capacitor? We do run into a lot of that as well. But yeah, it’s all about getting people motivated, making sure they do what they’re doing, having a maturity about you. But most importantly, having an interest in the industry and be able to talk.
Brian: So what started this discussion and our thoughts on talking about this this week was this report that was done by Intelligent.com that came out in September just last month. And it talked about some of the challenges that companies are having with hiring recent college graduates. So just to share some statistics on that, it’s really amazing that, for example, the report asked a question, this is about 1,000, almost 1,000 people they surveyed – managers. How many of the recent college graduates who hired this year have been successful at the company? So they asked that question. And less than 25% said “all of them.” Quite a few said “some”, 60% or 62% said some. And then over 10% said only a few. And there was a cohort that said none at all. So what this leads to, essentially, 75% of companies are reporting that some or all the recent college graduates they hired are unsatisfactory. They’re not meeting the goals. And so when asked further, the report also noted that hiring managers say that recent college grads are unprepared for the workforce, can’t handle the workload, and are unprofessional. I’d love to see a report on our generation Gen X, Andy, with what they would have said– But here the report went on further to understand and ask why haven’t the college graduates been successful. And I asked that question as well. And one thing stood out to us is poor communication skills is one of the top answers. What do you take from that, Andy?
Andy: Well, yeah, number four, behind lack of motivation, lack of professionalism, as you just pointed out. Poor organizational skills. But this communication thing is a particular problem. And I hate to say this, in particular, it’s a problem for young men versus young women. There’s been a bunch of research that’s been done about this. And a lot of it’s because they spend some of some on screens and interacting with non-humans. In fact, there was a study done where they took the iPads and they took the tablets and the smartphones away from a group of boys and girls. And the girls within some period of time started to interact with each other and talking to one another. But the boys just sat there. Again, these are young kids. But they’ve been so conditioned to working with these devices that they didn’t know how to interact with people. And I think that doesn’t really end. If you don’t address that problem at some point in your life, it’s going to continue. So this poor communication skill thing– and you and I were talking about this before, when on air – that there are some theories about the kind of people you should hire. And you mentioned something that you’re a friend who is a PhD in organizational behavior or something. And so it’s something about what kind of people actually tend to have better communication skills. Do you want to share that?
Brian: Yeah. So I do what we’re talking about this today. So I just so happen to have a friend, Dr. Corey Castillo, who has a PhD in organizational leadership and effectiveness. And I asked him the question. So we’ve got this cohort of folks who apparently don’t have motivation, poor communication skills, et cetera. He said something really interesting. I said, What’s a manager to do about this? Where do you go to find those people? He had this concept. He sent me a paper he wrote about this. He said his concept– a story of service. He has this concept that’s all about interpersonal acuity, is how he defines it. And it’s when interaction and communication is a major determinant of individual performance in an organization, an individual’s performance. So he asked, Where might I search for talent with high interpersonal acuity? His answer, what he found in his research is the candidates with direct service experience. So people working at Starbucks, or like the coffee shop, or McDonald’s, or whatever, a service oriented organization. And it’s because it teaches that interpersonal acuity, that ability to relate and collaborate based on interpersonal experience, bringing that to e-commerce. And we’re talking commerce, of course, here. E-commerce role, an entry-level role, not only will they be grateful for the role, but also will have the background and the grit to actually — not only appreciate, but get the work done and communicate effectively. Think about someone who’s at a coffee shop interacting with 500 customers each day with people yelling at him about all kinds of things, then having to get these. So it’s not just a person who walks out having a 4.0 GPA from an Ivy League school who may not have that experience. And that was his point, right, in saying that. So where do we go? service industries. At the end of the day, is this really new Andy? We heard this about millennials. We heard this about Gen Z. Millennial Overkill, the media branding, the handcuffed, and unknowing generation. I mean, these are all these stories you see. And we pulled up– for those of you watching, we pulled up some headlines from past years. And what do millennials really want to do at work? And do they really want to work? So is this really just an age thing? I wonder. It just happened to catch– we’re indicting Gen Z right now because of their age more than anything else. I wonder.
Andy: Yeah, this is an age old discussion in a way. People always complain about the next generation. They’re soft. They don’t know how to do anything. I do think there’s a fundamental difference here. And it’s probably driven a lot by social media. And there’s been a lot of research about this that Gen Z came of age with social media in tow. Older generations, even the millennials, it was later in life. And in those formative early teenage years when you’re spending all your time on Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok, you’re not developing as a person. Whereas if you get something that hits you when you’re in your 20s, at least you’re an adult at that point, like it was with Millennials. So I think we just did a big experiment, sadly, on a whole generation. And we’re going to find out what happened. But the early reports are not great.
Brian: Well, here’s the data from this report, intelligent.com, put out. The fact is, six out of 10 firms had to fire a recent college grad this year in 2024. 60% fail rate in terms of just having to release some portion of the folks that were hired in this cohort. So clearly, that’s not a good track record. We went to our community too, Andy. And we asked them on LinkedIn, and we got quite a few comments about this. This is one that came in from Rick Wingender. Rick is director of Integrated Marketing, Mueller Sports. And he actually studied this as part of his graduate work. He studied this phenomenon. What he says is, “This is not a failure of management. It’s a cultural and educational failure, a lowering of standards of performance. It’s an issue I’ve been studying since 2005, when I was a grad school teaching assistant, I was continually shocked by lack of academic preparedness, also for work ethic. And as a hiring manager, I think these contributions to the workplace continue to decline at an accelerating and alarming rate.” So Rick’s got– we’re gloom and doom here. Contrary to that, we also got a comment… So I think companies, Andy, are starting to recognize that they have a role in this, though. And so Robert Poratti, director of Product Marketing at VTEX, which is a software company. He said,”This is exactly why VTEX launched the DCS, Digital Commerce Specialist Program, for recent college graduates. We hire and train participants across disciplines for 18 months and then place them in positions that align with their interest and skills”. So to me, Andy, there’s a little bit of, hey, management, we have to hire, right? You have to fill these roles. So how do we deal with it? Well, does the company have to change a bit in how they’re approaching, like VTEX is doing? What are your thoughts?
Andy: But you can’t lower the standards. That’s what we’re hearing repeatedly here, is that maybe in academia, they’ve lowered the standards. That’s arguable. And it’s probably true. There’s been a lot of grade inflation, for example. But let’s say they have lowered the standards. When they graduate from high school college, what have you, businesses can’t lower their standards accordingly. In fact, the standards are going up, not down, because customer expectations are going up, not down. But I’m struck by what Robert said here, that he said, you know, in line with our interest and skills. I think the solution here is everything is an apprenticeship now. It just is. When you graduate from high school or college, it’s all a trial. And we’re going to just throw a bunch of people out and see what happens. There’s a company that I know pretty well. In fact, he’s a member of our community. And they’re hiring people to drive forklifts. And he told me a number that’s stunning. He said, if we hire 400 people, we lose 360 to 370 of them. Part of it is that they’re getting drawn away to other companies, because it’s a competitive marketplace. But most of it is, they just don’t care. They can’t keep people in place, because there’s just no motivation to want to do the work. Earlier generations, people were happy to have the work. And today, there’s just been this kind of a situation that’s set in where you can just live with your parents, I guess. And this is having ramifications and ripple effects through our economy. And that’s why our companies are automating things. That’s why our companies are using AI. It’s not just because it’s a cool neat technology. Part of it in B2B in particular, is because they can’t find people to fill the jobs.
Brian: Well, we asked our community when we poll on LinkedIn, as we do always, Andy. And we asked the question, how prepared our recent college graduates to work in B2B e-commerce? This is sad. 64% said not very. And almost 20% said not at all. That’s almost 85% said they’re not prepared to work in this area, which is an indictment. Only 8% said college graduates are very prepared. Only 8%. That’s crazy. Most of the people that respond to our poll are hiring managers. They’re more senior.
Andy: And Brian, these are recent college graduates. Keep that in mind. So arguably, these are people who have spent a quarter of a million dollars, $300,000, $400,000. At some more elite schools, as much as a half a million dollars. And the conclusion is that 85% of these people are not prepared to work in B2B e-commerce.
Brian: That’s crazy. I read this book about 20 years ago, and it was called Getting Them To Give A Damn. It was all about finding employees who care, and particularly amongst younger generations, at the time it was Gen X. But now it’s obviously different. But it’s been an enduring problem. And I think some of the things we’ve seen here is that it could potentially be getting worse. But that book gave me some optimism then, and it does now. And there’s really some methodologies like Dr. Castillo was saying, Corey, it’s looking in specific places like service industries to find the right talent.
Andy: By the way, what I’ve found personally is when you do find somebody who is skilled and talented and interested, they just stand out far more than they used to. There are people like this. For sure, there are people who are motivated. There are people who are interested. There are people who are excited and reliable and can communicate. I don’t know that it’s the mean anymore. It might be the exception. But when you do find them, they’re like gold.
Brian: Yep. And we’ve been lucky in our business, Andy, and then in other businesses, I’ve been involved with to find those folks. And to really treat them well as an employer and make sure that they’re happy. And we’re giving them increased responsibility, things of that nature.
