Yahoo Finance A&W seeks Millennial entrepreneurs as the Internet generation struggle to find careers
Depending on whom you ask, Millennials are either the most innovative generation ever, or the laziest and most entitled generation ever. One thing’s for sure, though: the Internet cohort faces more uncertain job prospects that their parents did. The lifetime job is dead. Personal brands are a necessity. And the idea of moving away from home before you’re 25 is increasingly a pipe dream.
So it has to be good news when an established company announces it will beat the bushes for a few 25 young men and women to help them build their business. The catch? The company isn’t a sexy player in tech or social media, but a bricks-and-mortar burger chain best known for its root beer and sandwiches named after family members.
A&W Canada announced this month a recruitment push to get Millennials running franchise stores. Hoping to tap into the “strong entrepreneurial spirit” of the generation, A&W will provide training, support, and a shiny new ‘urban concept’ restaurant. Would-be managers need only pass a few interviews and pony up $125,000-$150,000 to get it off the ground (if that seems steep, it’s a more than 50 per cent discount on the typical franchise fee).
“Everything that we’ve learned so far about Millennials and their desire for entrepreneurship and their fit with the urban guests, their high energy level, their passion for food, seem to be a huge opportunity for them and for us,” says A&W Canada president Susan Senecal.
For A&W, it’s perhaps a way to reinvigorate a throwback brand and bring new blood into the company. For a few deep-pocketed Millennials, it’s a potential answer to the question of how to make that leap from school to a career.
Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996, about ages 19-35) face a job market still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. Companies continue to downsize, experience is tough to get unless you work for free for a while and wages are not growing. Rushing to face this are a generation of university grads finding out that the Liberal Arts degree that would open doors 20 years ago now often won’t get you an interview.
“In the economy at a high level, there’s a major shift. We’re shifting to a new marketplace that is less about lifetime employment, less about full time workers with benefits, more about freelancing without benefits and more about job hopping,” says Dan Schawbel, a Boston-based Millennial career and workplace expert, and author of "Promote Yourself and Me 2.0."
Jobs that used to require proximity can now be outsourced to workers halfway around the world. The educational requirements, meanwhile, have gotten tougher. Degrees in business, computer science, and engineering will open doors. A specialization like nursing, and you can write your own ticket.
And don’t forget to network.
“It’s all about finding the right people that can connect you to positions, whereas a decade, two decades, three decades ago, it was about finding the right position. Now in order to get a job, you really have to know somebody,” he says.
In other words, for the unconnected and English majors, the world is becoming a tougher place.
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The numbers game is getting tougher, too. According to data released last year, Millennials are now the biggest generation in the workforce, ahead of the established GenXers and the slow-to-retire Boomers. And when a GenXer gets squeezed out of a shrinking company, they re-enter the job hunt locked and loaded.
“Basically, you’re competing against so many people, and all of these people have a competitive edge over you,” says Schawbel.
So what are the options for young graduates running into a wall of overqualified competitors and a lack of contacts?
Lauren Friese, a 2005 Queen’s graduate who struggled to find work, found her own solution by founding recruitment firm TalentEgg in 2008. She now spends her time helping young graduates get past the same employment hump that she struggled with.
Maybe not surprisingly, she has a more positive view than many, though she acknowledges the world of work and the skills needed to succeed have changed quickly.
“I think every time a new generation enters the work force and we have a name for it, there are similar stories that are told and they start with ‘this generation is going to change the way we work’,” she says.
“The underlying message is that it’s always been hard to leave the world of school.”
She thinks one reason why Millennials may find the transition harder than previous generations is that they are the first generation widely told to follow their passions. This can be great for those who can match passion with opportunity. Unfortunately, the world also needs plumbers.
“I think there’s definitely more resistance towards taking jobs that are not cool or sexy or that are actually meaningful and can have an impact,” she says.
The result has been young people living with their parents longer, going back to school to retrain, delaying buying a house, a car or having children.
But combine all this with Internet culture and social media and a generation positioned to understand it better than their predecessors, and you have the perfect conditions for entrepreneurship, or at least a difference sense of how to look at a career.
“What people often call entrepreneurship when they’re talking about millennials… what they’re really seeing is they’re more likely to see themselves as the CEO of Me Inc., that they own their own skills,” says Friese.
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Jon French, director of marketing & communications at The Next 36, a non-profit that nurtures young entrepreneurs, says Millennials are much more apt to strike out on their own than previous cohorts.
“When I go to campuses I think back to when I was graduating for the business program, everybody was going to work for banks or in consulting or in investment banking,” he says.
His organization picks 36 young Canadian innovators a year and provides them with training support and contacts to potential partners and funding sources.
“Whether it’s a response to lack of job opportunities in the market or if it’s just more attractive, there are more students that are interested in working for themselves (now).”
While The Next 36 focuses on tech start-ups, that entrepreneurial spirit is the same one that A&W’s Senecal says she’s hoping to tap into.
“Some of our most successful restaurants have Millennial connections, either an operator or operating partner or manager or franchisee who really understands urban life, what people are looking for – things like the hours of operation, the type of service – and could engage with these guests in a really successful way,” she says.
Beyond just a chance to bring young managers into an old company, she wants to tap into the different approach that Millennials take towards consumption. For instance, it was an outcry from younger customers that prompted the chain to overhaul its ingredients and introduce its “ingredients guarantee”.
“I think what is absolutely part of the Millennial ethos is an interest in food, a passion around food,” she says.
The new managers will be set up in “urban concept” restaurants styled more closely to a downtown gourmet burger restaurant than the traditional fast-food layout.
The first ones will be located in Toronto, and the chain expects to have all 25 Millennial-run restaurants up and running by 2020.
It may be a new approach, but it certainly won’t be the first time young people will be going out to get a job at a local burger joint.
