Hiring and retaining cannabis employees requires understanding of two different cultures.

The cannabis industry is booming, thanks to unprecedented consumer demand. However, being part of a fast-growing industry doesn’t guarantee success.

Cannabis dispensaries, cultivators, and processors still need to make sure they can handle the pressure of doing business in a highly regulated and competitive environment. Employees must handle cannabis compliance, legal cannabis concerns, cannabis safety, and complex seed-to-sale software reporting requirements.

At the same time, cannabis dispensaries in states like California and Maryland must find solutions for streamlining time-intensive manual processes and training their employees to do the same. Hiring and retaining top talent under these conditions is a significant challenge.

This puts pressure on cannabis employers to find, train, and retain top talent. However, in order to do so, cannabis industry leaders have to confront generational gaps that will play an increasingly important role in the cannabis industry’s human resources.

Hiring Millennials: An Overview

Millennials will make up 46% of available talent by 2020. As the older of the two generations that most cannabis recruiting teams will focus on, millennials will typically lean towards managerial positions rather than entry-level ones.

• Millennials are comfortable with technology. Anyone born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s counts as a millennial. These people grew up in a world before iPhones and cloud computing yet formed a powerful bond with new technology as it entered the mainstream culture.

• Millennials tend towards liberal, individualistic lifestyles. They focus more on work/life balance than previous generations and are highly skeptical of formal workplace norms.

• Workplace culture is more important than pay. A healthy workplace culture is crucial to the millennial mindset. A competitive salary just isn’t enough to entice this generation to work—they have to believe in what they’re doing.

Cannabis employers who are able to spark millennials’ curiosity and ambition will earn the service of creative, industrious workers who are equally at home managing HIPAA compliance and interacting with customers.

What to Expect From Generation Z

Generation Z is a broad term encompassing anyone born in the mid-90s up to around 2012. This generation never knew a world without Wi-Fi. As a result, technology dominates the Generation Z lifestyle and its cultural values.

• Generation Z gets technology. For young entry-level dispensary employees, there is nothing intimidating about using HIPAA-compliant point-of-sale software or navigating a system like METRC.

• Communication is a weakness. This generation has a harder time communicating and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. 

• Short attention spans. Patience is a virtue often lacking in people raised in an era of immediate and untempered gratification. If your point-of-sale process moves slower than the point-and-click that generation Z expects, you may lose the interest of your youngest employees.

Choosing a Point of Sale that will train your staff

Employers don’t have time to train employees and run their business.  Leave the training to ezGreen Compliance POS; Customers will shop elsewhere if your employees are not able to assist them and get them in and out of the store.  Let ezGreen train your employees to maximize customer throughput and satisfaction; Employers can’t afford the risk of non-compliance if their employees are not properly trained on a market-leading, compliant POS system.  Leave it to ezGreen to manage compliance for you.

Every Employee Matters

The vast majority of cannabis companies employ no more than a handful of employees. Under these conditions, every single worker plays an important role in the overall success of the company, and larger-scale responsibilities like data security are shared between all. Employers who cater to specific generational mindsets will be able to attract higher-quality candidates at every level.

Sources:

https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/generation-z-enters-workforce.html

7 Tips For Hiring Generation Z Employees

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