Generation Why?

On Friday, I arranged for a series of interviews to take place at one of our client companies on Monday. The 10:00 AM did not show up to the interview and at 10:10 AM the HR person at the hiring company gave us a call letting us know that he had not shown up. In a panic, I called his one and only phone number (which happened to be a cell phone) and left him a voicemail. I was upset. I thought to my myself, "If he could not make it, why didn’t he let me know?" That same day, I got into work at 9:45 AM because I had a doctors appointment. I did not get a chance to read through all of my emails until about 11:00 AM when I saw an email sent by the candidate who missed his interview. "An email?" I thought to myself. How could he guarantee that I would see it in time to inform the client company? I was even more frustrated. I thought about how I would handle the situation. What would I have done to communicate in an emergency? I would have probably sent an email and left a voicemail to make sure that someone got the message. Is it because he is young, I thought to myself, or is he just unprofessional? Or is being young equal to being unprofessional? Or are the tendencies of the younger workforce unprofessional? I'm not sure. What I do know is that younger workers will be working with older workers and they both need to adjust their work habits (in this case their desired methods of communication).

That same day, the 9:00 AM called us at 8:30 to let us know that she will not be able to attend her interview because she was not able to find transportation. I was out of the office, so a co-worker of mine attempted to call the client company to let them know. She realized that she did not have a phone number and the company is not listed (they are a start-up). After searching for 15 minutes, she found a phone number. She called it and asked to speak to the HR person. The person who picked up seemed really confused and said that they were not the person in question. My co-worker asked if she could have that person's phone number and the person on the other end said that they did not know it. Doesn’t this company have a directory? Do they not know how to transfer phone calls? Do they only communicate physically or through email? Why does something so basic, like using a telephone, seem so difficult? Is it their ages? Having toured the place, there are not too many people over 40 working there. Have they forgotten the basic administrative things that were once assumed for everyone who worked on an office to know? I would like to think that this was an isolated event, and that the person on the other end of the phone line was once of the few people who don't know how to handle the phone. Two situations in one day with two millennials gives me the impression that millennials are ahead of the times with new methods of communications and behind the times with old methods of communication.