Recruiting Digital Natives make companies ask lots of questions. Some of their concerns are not justfied, and we can also read many nonsenses.

“They have their habits, their own way to do things, with their own tools…we only have to adopt those tools to seduce them”. Wrong ! They don’t juge by appearances (or as we say in french, “a cowl doesn’t make a monk”. That’s not the way to attract them. Even if they come, they’ll leave soon.

What matters isn’t tools but culture. A certain culture implies a certain way of working, a certain kind of organization, and at the end, the relevant tools to support it. Tools are only the proof that alignment was made. Put wikis, blogs, social networks, IM, make it available oustide the firewall, make people and information accessible without changing anything else and you’ll fail. They won’t come, leave quickly or will be very disapointed, whith the feeling of having been tricked. Claim you are what you are not and you won’t be believed for long. The difference between marketing and reality is aligment.

Then the first thing to think about is “what are our future stakes” and “do we need to change the way we operate”. The operating modes will soon need new tools to support them. And at this time things will be coherent.

And what about culture ? It’s an objective, not a starting point, you can’t decree it (unless you already have the needed one). It will evolve because of both new internal practices and recruitment of people who are like you or like what you want to become. A self-feeding phenomenon.

Believing that tools will make your enterprise trendy is mistaking question for its answer : he point is not about attracting digital natives but attracting those who’ll serve your goals and being able to take the most of their potential. Provided their skills match your needs….

culture , culture-dentreprise , digital-natives , generation-Y , Recrutement , Social computing , social-software , web-2.0