Talentfinds Day 2025

Last year, on February 15th, coLeague launched "Talentfinds Day"—a holiday we made up—to celebrate the incredible people we've hired over the years. We even compared hiring to dating and shared tips on leveling up your hiring game.

And it’s Talentfinds Day once again! This year, we’re asking: What might be keeping your most junior hires from becoming great Talentfinds?

Work Culture: Before & After

At coLeague, our work is rooted in culture. We believe culture—"how work gets done and how we relate to each other while doing it"—has the greatest impact on employee performance, especially for new hires. People bring skills and experience to their new job, but culture determines how effectively they can use them. They also bring expectations, their own cultural context, and sometimes, baggage.

The newest professionals have had an especially turbulent transition from college to career. When the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, they were in school—stuck in the dorms or sent home - nothing was as it was designed to be. Many of them missed out on internships, professor office hours, and getting involved in local volunteer opportunities. They weren't indoctrinated into our workplaces the way generations ahead of them had been.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, remote work went from a perk to a necessity. The office became the exception, not the rule. Layoffs surged, the gig economy was taking further hold, and the playbook for early career professionals was rewritten on the fly. Where veteran staff members may have previously been able to provide mentorship, they were navigating their own topsy-turvy work lives.

A Company Culture Tug-of-War

Are we experiencing a typical “generation gap” or something more?

These changes, on the surface, look like your standard “generation gap” of understanding between senior leaders and the newest professionals. This friction is as old as time immemorial. We think this one is a little different, however, as these tectonic shifts happened to everyone, but one group has so little context for what things were like before.

The reaction we’ve seen from organizations is to either double down on the old ways, or to overcorrect and make sweeping changes that might be more reactionary than accommodating. Then, there’s always the “having your cake and eating it, too” approach, which is to try to adopt a flexible workplace while still holding on to unstated norms that are hard for new hires to decipher.

How will your junior staff blossom into those great “talentfinds” if they are struggling to figure out how to operate successfully in your organization?

We think there is a more strategic approach to unifying your people into a culture that works for everyone. Digging in your heels creates resistance and even resentment. Change without structure leads to chaos. Unspoken norms create unnecessary confusion and frustration.

Instead, let’s take a little bit from column A (getting clear about your existing culture & expectations so you can communicate it well to incoming junior staff) and a little from column B (actually listening to what this generation needs and finding ways to lean into the fresh perspective they’re bringing to the table). Let’s avoid column C altogether. 🙂

A Different Type of “Hybrid” Approach

What were those columns again?

Column A: Clarify Expectations

You may have operating manuals and employee handbooks and policies and procedures, but how things really work is often a reflection of so much more. To get at any unwritten rules, you can ask some folks who started a year ago about what they were surprised about and what advice they would give to someone starting now. Ensure you’re covering operating and cultural expectations at every stage of employee onboarding, and document, document, document! 

Column B: Listen Closely

Sometimes what sounds like dissatisfaction might actually be someone asking for help. Listen to what your most junior staff are saying about their experience. Are they frustrated, not because of how things are set up, but because they don’t understand what’s expected of them? Do they have ideas for how things could be better but don’t want to act out of turn? Is there an opportunity for accommodating an individual’s needs that doesn’t have to apply to the whole company?

The result:

A “hybrid” of inclusion and accommodation. Inclusion means ensuring the existing culture is welcoming and easy to navigate. Accommodation means taking reasonable steps to support the needs of your staff.

Understand that this will mean change, and change is always hard. So acknowledge what you are trying based on their feedback, but let them know it might take a bit of time. They’re new professionals - they might not yet understand how hard organizational change can be!

Organizations that thrive will be those that create a culture that works for everyone—not just senior leaders, and not just the new hires with the loudest demands. Maybe it’s time to conduct an engagement survey, bring in a consultant, or hire a fractional leader to facilitate this change. An external perspective might be just what you need to get a handle on what frictions might need addressing and what is just typical difference between a diverse set of employees.

Whatever you decide to do, it’s important to keep in mind that the “before and after” reality isn’t going anywhere. There were those of us who knew office life before, and there’s everyone coming after. The kids in high school now will bring their own unique differences, but they will join the current new professionals as “afters.” It will be decades until the last of the “befores” leave the workforce.

If you want the next generation of professionals to become great Talentfinds, you need to involve them in shaping the future. Just as previous generations adapted from paper memos to email, it's time to consider what Gen Z (and soon, Gen Alpha) will bring to the table. Because time—and change—won't stop for anyone.  

And don’t we want to be celebrating Talentfinds Day for years to come? 💚