Professional Social Media: Hire Experience Over Age
Let’s say I’m starting a business: an independent video rental emporium. My knowledge of accounting pales in comparison to my knowledge of rare videocassettes, so I decide to hire someone to head my business’s finances. The two candidates for the job are as follows: a recently graduated 23-year-old who holds two MBAs (one in economics, one in accounting) and has had numerous successful, financial-based internships. The other candidate is a middle-aged ice cream truck driver who has been paying his own bills and balancing his own checkbook for thirty years. Who would be the smarter hire?
The answer to me is obvious – the 23-year-old. The point that I am attempting to make is that experience and age are not always co-related. It would be extremely nonsensical to hire anyone for anything based solely on his or her age “just because,” (to quote Hollis Thomases’s article). This includes social media. If a CEO assumes someone will do a bang-up job with the company’s facebook simply because the candidate is young and has a personal facebook account, of course something will go wrong. But I believe the problem has less to do with a person’s age and more to do with a person’s (lack of) relevant experience.
A majority of Ms. Thomases’s “11 Reasons” why “A 23-year-old shouldn’t run your social media” are not exclusive to recent college graduates. Even if you put a 43-year-old marketing executive in charge of your company’s pintrest and instagram accounts, you would still need to ensure the new social media coordinator understands your business’s mission, reputation, and audience. Further, no matter the person’s age or experience, it would be a poor decision to give that person total control over the social media without “keeping the keys.” Conversely, not all 23-year-olds are irresponsible, unfocused no-nothings with zero concept of corporate culture. Ms. Thomases and I are really arguing the same point from opposite directions: when a business hires someone to run the social media, age alone should have nothing to do with it.
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