By Dean McGlynn, Barnsbury HA Project Manager & CIH Futures board member

This crisis may be the biggest opportunity the housing sector has seen to recruit a new generation.

I’m a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. The New Yorker writer and journalist is a great thinker – or at least he’s a convincing thinker. You might not realise it, but you’ve probably been influenced by his work without knowing it. Gladwell has been credited with popularising ideas such as broken windows theory, the 10,000 hour-rule and the talent myth.

So what does this have to do with housing? Well, his podcast, Revisionist History, has been the soundtrack of many of my state-sanctioned walks over the past year and in the episode “Hamlet was wrong“, he details his own approach to employing someone: nihilism.

Nihilism, after a quick google, is defined as the “belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated”. Now, the idea that everything is pretty much meaningless is a pretty bleak idea for me to be throwing out there at the moment but stay with Malcolm and I…

Gladwell’s theory is that the whole prediction system when it comes to employing people is simply “an extravagant exercise in self-delusion”.

He believes that recruitment processes, such as interviews, applications and CV’s are simply well-practiced and rehearsed systems that actually have little bearing on whether or not someone will be good at the job, simply that they will be good at getting the job.

Too often, Gladwell argues, do biases and prejudices within a system obscure the process and make it unreliable.

Instead, a nihilistic approach to recruitment provides a way to get rid of the same old rehearsed responses and tried and tested CVs and cover letters that people have relied upon to secure a job, rather than thrive in a job.

For Gladwell, a lottery would be just as effective in finding a good employee as a traditional recruitment process.

So am I saying the housing sector should throw their job profiles and recruitment policies out the window and embrace the meaninglessness of nihilism? Not quite. What I am advocating for is a leap of faith.

There’s no question that the pandemic has hit some groups more than others, and young people are chief among them. They have taken the brunt of it with less employment opportunities, lower wages, and social mobility slowing down. This is on top of a looming climate emergency, of course. We owe young people a decent future.

I believe that not only does the sector now have an opportunity to help young people, we also have a chance to empower them by recruiting a new generation of workers as we recover from the pandemic. We have a duty to ensure the long term prospects of young people can be met in the sector.

There has been some positive signs of this recently – the government’s Kickstart scheme is a positive move that the housing sector appears to have embraced, with Clarion organising a large scheme of recruitment. I also know that my g320 colleagues have been working with Charityworks to ensure that smaller housing associations do their bit too.

My CIH Futures colleagues stand as a testament to the value that younger people bring to the sector, and initiatives such as CIH’s Under 30’s membership scheme and HQN’s Housing’s Next Generation, show that the sector is moving to increasingly support young people.

However we need to commit to ensuring that  6 months of Kickstart funding isn’t simply a short-term freebie that ends up with those temporary recruits being cast aside when the funding dries up.

Instead the sector should acknowledge the value recruiting a diverse range of people brings to an organisation. In particular how young people can bring fresh ideas and energy to a role, and are often unencumbered by an organisation’s pre-established ways of thinking.

What young people often lack – experience, qualifications and a track record – can be overcome by attitude and application. Knowledge can be learned and qualifications can be earned. All it requires is a bit of investment and a leap of faith from those in charge.

“I fell in to housing” has become a bit of a trope of the sector over the years- the idea that many senior figures never planned to end up working in the sector is interesting but it does also beg the question: if you didn’t have the experience or knowledge of housing before entering the sector, how much of a leap of faith did the organisation take with you?

So as a sector let’s seize the opportunity that Kickstart has presented us with.

Lets invest in young people and create a post-pandemic generation of housing professionals to take us forward into the new normal and lead the recovery.