Doesn’t an ages-old saying state “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?”
It appears a handful of company owners and Internet gurus want to challenge that mindset, based on some articles and blog posts surfacing online.
Authors are advocating for businesses to think before they hire young college graduates to operate their social media services. It appears they want to teach older employees how to use social media, rather than hire someone new who already has the skills to utilize it.
A recent article in Inc. Magazine is bold enough to blatantly warn business owners “a 23-year-old shouldn’t run your social media” in its headline. Although the author contradictorily retracts the generalization in the first sentence of her article, the statement still irks me, because it is hugely inaccurate.
A majority of the Inc. article’s 11 reasons to not hire fresh college graduates to manage social media services are based more on stereotypes of younger adults than on fact. (For example, this statement: “… if you hire a young person to manage your social media, you may also need to need to worry about how he or she is actually spending his or her time. Will you need to be monitoring the person?)
I hope businesses would conduct normal hiring practices when considering to hire someone for a position to manage social media. I agree, it is foolish for a company to hire someone strictly based on their young age, but it is also foolish to assume a younger person is too immature to handle a position if they are more qualified than any other candidates for the job.
While interning at The Columbus Dispatch this summer, I met a younger staff member who was hired a few years after she graduated college to help operate the newspaper’s Internet presence, including its Website, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. She works with a Web staff of several people. When she gave an engaging presentation to the interns about social media it was clear she knew more about it than the rest of the staff members combined.
She taught us — no one had to teach her. And she was definitely mature enough and skilled enough to handle the position.
Social media is second nature to a majority of recent college graduates. Hiring a young employee with fresh ideas — someone who is responsible, hard-working and knows how social media works — is not a bad idea. If the new hire has the right credentials, it’s smart and cost-effective.
A person’s age shouldn’t be the only reason he or she is hired. But if a person is qualified, age shouldn’t be a reason he or she isn’t hired, either.