Not Your Father's Job Market

By Kim Bellard, September 24, 2021

If you, like me, continue to think that TikTok is mostly about dumb stunts, or, more charitably, as an unexpected platform for social activism, you probably also missed that TikTok thinks it could take on LinkedIn. 

Welcome to #TikTokresumes.  Welcome to the Gen Z workplace.  If healthcare is having a hard time adapting to Gen Z patients – and it is -- then dealing with Gen Z workers is even harder. 

TikTok actually announced the program in early July, but, as a baby boomer, I did not get the memo.  It was a pilot program, only active from July 7 to July 31, and only for a select number of employers, which included Chipotle and Target.  The announcement stated:

TikTok believes there's an opportunity to bring more value to people's experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment. Short, creative videos, combined with TikTok's easy-to-use, built-in creation tools have organically created new ways to discover talented candidates and career opportunities.

The Wall Street Journal is also watching the trend: “Video résumés are fast becoming the new cover letter for a certain breed of young creatives…For some brands, soliciting video résumés on social media is a way to meet more young, diverse job candidates.” 

As it turns out, even Gen Zers have misgivings about the idea.  A survey by Tallo found them fairly evenly split. A bigger concern, though, was the possibility of bias: Nagaraj Nadendla, SVP of development at Oracle Cloud HCM, raised the same concerns in TechCrunch: The very element that gives video resumes their potential also presents the biggest problems. Video inescapably highlights the person behind the skills and achievements. As recruiters form their first opinions about a candidate, they will be confronted with information they do not usually see until much later in the process, including whether they belong to protected classes because of their race, disability or gender.

Lest you think this is not important to your organization, that Gen Z’s needs don’t really matter, Morten Peterson, CEO of Worksome, writing in Fast Company, calls Gen Z the “new disruptors,” pointing out: “The overwhelming majority of today’s graduate pool come from Generation Z and will do so for the next decade at least.”  

And they vote with their feet.  Research from Amdocs found they, along with Millennials, are much more likely than Baby Boomers or even Gen X to have considered leaving their job within the last year:

Every industry is having a hard time recruiting, and keeping, workers these days, and healthcare is no exception.  Between normal burnout, pandemic-related burnout, vaccine mandates, and the lure of jobs that offer more opportunity for remote work, most healthcare organizations are struggling to have enough staff.  When the current Baby Boomer doctors, nurses, technicians, and aides retire, there better be Gen Z replacements ready to step in.

Some healthcare organizations are already starting to use TikTok for marketing,  others are trying to combat misinformation, but most healthcare organizations are probably not just behind the curve when it comes to recruiting workers using TikTok; they may not have yet realized there is a curve.  If, as NYT said, one page resumes are gong the way of the fax machine, well, in healthcare those fax machines haven’t gone very far. 

RecTech Media’s Mr. Russell said it: “video is eating the world.”  Healthcare’s world too. 

TikTok resumes may not take off.  Tallo’s survey found it low on the list of sites Gen Zers felt comfortable posting a resume on (perhaps not coincidentally, Tallo’s site was rated the highest, followed by LinkedIn).  Video resumes more generally may not become the norm.  Those bias concerns with video resume are real and must be appropriately considered. 

But Gen Zers are different, and healthcare organizations, like other organizations, better be thinking about how to best recruit them.

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)