Belichick may not need SnapFace to field a team. But you do.
Posted On February 16, 2017
Bill Belichick is, most would agree, clearly the most successful person in his field – coaching professional football. He has led the New England Patriots to five Super Bowl victories, including two of the last three years. He is the benchmark by which other NFL coaches are now judged.
But while his fashion sense is somewhere just this side of high school sophomore (the hoodies! The hoodies!), he claims to have no idea what Snapchat is – or even how to say it.
“I’m not on SnapFace and all that,” Belichick said on a radio show recently when asked about a controversial video posted to social media by a player on an opposing team, according to ESPN. “I’m not really too worried about what they put on InstantChat, or whatever it is.”
One might think that’d be a drawback for a man who manages a workforce comprised almost entirely of millennials. But remember: Other than a few free agents, Belichick doesn’t have to recruit his workforce. He drafts his new hires every April. He doesn’t have to connect with millennial customers to grow his bottom line; he just has to beat the Steelers, Dolphins, Broncos and Falcons.
You, Mr. or Ms. Generation X or Baby Boomer employer, don’t have that luxury, unless you’ve got a few Lombardi Trophies lying around that we don’t know about.
You want the best and brightest of the younger generation working for you, and they aren’t just lining up outside your office waiting for their number to be called. You’ve got to go find them, and convince them that your company is where they want to go.
You want to reach the country’s largest segment of consumers, and you can’t just wave your customer reviews at them. You’ve got to go where they are, to live where they live.
So while you may think of yourself as the Bill Belichick of insurance or flooring or temporary staffing, you can’t afford to be as blasé about social media as he is.
According to careerarc.com, 79 percent of job seekers in 2016 used social media in their searches – and if you looked at only job seekers in the first 10 years of their career, the number jumped to 86 percent. One in five had applied for a job via social media. Fifty-three percent of millennial job hunters had used a smartphone to conduct their search.
What’s more, careerarc.com cited an SHRM study which found that 84 percent of the organizations it surveyed were recruiting on social media, a sharp rise from the 56 percent doing it in 2011.
You already know that online shopping is a rapidly growing segment of the marketplace – USA Today cited a 2016 UPS/ComScore report that showed online shopping made up more than half of the purchases of those surveyed.
That trend is being driven largely by millennials, who the report found were making 54 percent of their purchases online.
So while Bill Belichick doesn’t have to worry about what SnapFace is (or isn’t), it would behoove you, Mr. or Ms. Business Owner, to go where your future employees and your customers are. Have a presence there. Advertise there. Recruit there. Sell there. Jump on in. The water’s fine.