Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Employees at Westinghouse in Monroeville play volleyball during their lunch hour Wednesday. The company built the court as part of its effort to try to attract adn keep younger employees.

By Anya Sostek, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It's noon on a sunny Wednesday at Westinghouse Electric headquarters in Monroeville, and several young engineers are stationed at their usual spot: the white-sand volleyball court where almost every day they spike, set and sweat their way through the lunch hour.

It's a relatively lengthy workday interruption that many companies would not tolerate, much less condone. But Westinghouse not only built its employees one of the nicest -- if not the nicest -- volleyball courts in the area, but it also added lights so they can play in leagues at night after work.

The company is firmly committed to, shall we say, courting its new employees -- many of them recent college graduates hired in the last few years.

And Westinghouse isn't alone. After years, if not decades, of minimal entry-level hiring, several of Pittsburgh's largest companies are now on a youthful hiring spree. Such companies, which also include Bayer Corp. and U.S. Steel, are facing the challenge of luring and retaining hundreds of new college graduates and addressing the generation gap between them and their middle-age co-workers.

"We had economic hard times and for about seven or eight years we hadn't had a college graduate hired," said Eric Denison, director of insulation systems for Bayer, which has its North American headquarters in Robinson. "The goal is to hire new blood ... and we want to keep them happy."

Unspoken best practices

At Bayer last month, 24-year-old Matt Yedwabnik stood up in front of about 100 co-workers in the company cafeteria, slightly nervous as he led the formal kickoff event for new networking group that he and other recent college graduates had formed.

The kickoff celebration for the group, known as LINKS, was complete with hors d'oeuvres and speeches from Greg Babe, chief executive officer of Bayer MaterialScience, and Willy Scherf, chief executive officer of Bayer Corporate and Business Services.

"The story behind it is that we were kind of finding each other on our own naturally," said Mr. Yedwabnik, a California native and Michigan State graduate with no previous ties to Pittsburgh. "We had that bond, and we decided we wanted to get as many people as we could."

While the origins of LINKS may have been purely social, the group's leaders -- all of whom were hired in 2005 or after -- have lofty goals for the organization. Working through official company channels, they've written a charter, a mission statement and elected officers. There's already a planned meeting with Mayor Luke Ravenstahl next month, and they hope to bring in speakers on financial planning, continuing education and other topics relevant to new hires.

They also hope to help Bayer adjust to the new reality of a new generation. When some of them interviewed at other companies, for example, they were taken out on the town at night by other recent college graduates.

That didn't happen during their Bayer interviews -- partly because there weren't other recent college graduates, and partly because management didn't know the latest recruiting procedures.

"You can bring all these unspoken best practices to the attention of Bayer," said Alison Costa, a leader of the LINKS group who has helped Bayer update its recruiting tactics. "This is not the way it was done 15 or 20 years ago."

Diversity training a priority

At U.S. Steel, many of the company's new hires weren't even born when the firm was last hiring new college graduates in significant numbers. "We went through the late '70s, the '80s, and nobody was hiring," said George Manos, general manager of human resources. "All of a sudden, we have a big hole. We had to go get a significant new number out of college and we had to get some of them into existing jobs."

Because U.S. Steel did much of its hiring in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it's now facing a flood of retirements. Nationwide, about 76 million baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1964, are set to retire in large numbers by the end of the decade.

And with the steel industry booming again, the company is now hiring about 250 new graduates per year.

But the new hiring effort hasn't come without a learning curve. After being overwhelmed by other companies' flashy recruiting displays at an engineering conference last year, U.S. Steel invested in a huge exhibit with video displays and pulsing music that it now takes to job fairs. Company executives also "reintroduced" themselves to college administrators in an effort to establish relationships with specific campuses.

With the college population pool significantly different than it was 30 years ago, the company has made diversity training a priority among its current employees. "Sixty-seven percent of graduating seniors in college will be females or minorities," said Mr. Manos. "We not only have to go hire people, but we have to understand different cultures."

After-work activities

Because Westinghouse started hiring new graduates again in 1998 -- after not hiring anybody out of college for about six years before that -- it's slightly further along on its offerings than some of the other companies.

Every year, for example, all of the company's new college graduates spend about a week together at the Renaissance Hotel, Downtown. They hear seminars on financial planning and the company's philosophy, complete a community service project together and go out to meals and Pirates games. The program was so successful that in 2005 the company started an abbreviated version for all of its new hires -- not just the new college graduates.

Westinghouse hired about 30 new graduates in 1998 and will hire more than 200 this year, about a third of whom will work in the Pittsburgh area. In addition to volleyball, Westinghouse also sponsors a golf league, softball teams and even ballroom dancing classes.

The company also has arranged for its employees to be able to earn master's degrees in business and mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh without having to leave the Westinghouse campus; there's now enough of a critical mass of employees interested that the professors come to Monroeville to teach. A master's degree in nuclear engineering also is available via distance learning from Penn State.

For Di Tang, who came to Westinghouse in one of the first classes of new graduates and now has worked there for six years, the support system from Westinghouse has totally shaped his Pittsburgh social network.

Mr. Tang, 28, was born in China and lived there until his family moved to the Philadelphia area when he was 10 years old. An internship at the Beaver Valley Power Station piqued his interest in nuclear engineering while he was a student at Penn State, and he joined Westinghouse straight out of college.

With no direct connection to the Pittsburgh area, Mr. Tang has met nearly all of his friends either at Westinghouse or through activities, such as biking and volleyball, that he developed an interest in through company-sponsored events.

Just two weeks ago, Mr. Tang flew to Spain to be the best man in the wedding of a friend that he made at work.

"One of the great benefits of working for a company that has a bigger [age] gap is that you have this group of young people that's just coming out of college that has similar interests," he said. "The company has invested a lot of money to ensure that there's after-work activities."

Challenge goes both ways

It's a conscious effort, said Dallas Frey, director of staffing and recruiting, who has worked for Westinghouse for nearly 33 years. "We really believe in something called 'employee engagement,' " he said. "If you keep people in their jobs and they feel good about it, that translates very directly into business outcomes."

But there's also a serious side to incorporating young people, en masse, into a company with a baby boomer work force: When older workers retire they take concrete knowledge with them -- a problem that can be more dramatic at places that have not had consistent hiring.

At Westinghouse, where the company now has contracts to build more than a dozen new power plants worldwide, there's a renewed effort to formally catalog information and pass it down to new hires through signed documents known as "knowledge transfer agreements."

Still, younger workers are sometimes "terrified" that their bosses will inadvertently take crucial information with them when they retire, said 28-year-old Leanne Lisien, who currently is president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the North American Young Generation in Nuclear, a group that serves as an informal new college graduate group at Westinghouse. "It's a challenge because those people are so busy doing work, it's hard to find the time to get information from them, and we're trying to hire so many people," she said. "It's a good challenge."

For baby boomers who haven't had twenty-somethings in the workplace for a while, the presence of younger workers also has injected other challenges in the form of a generation gap.

"The goal is that we learn from them, and they also have to learn from us," said Renee Zierden, who manages some of the new employees at Bayer. "We act differently than they do, and they communicate in a different way."

"We like to meet face to face," added Mr. Denison, at Bayer. "We like to get together in a meeting, and they would rather do it electronically, or through [instant messaging]."

Managers also say the younger generation asks for more feedback and more structure, and is quicker to question authority than older workers might have been at that stage in their careers. Younger workers joke about inefficient procedures, "because that's the way it's always been done," or about technology they see as outdated, such as a presentation on an overhead projector instead of PowerPoint.

"It's a challenge that goes both ways," said Mr. Manos at U.S. Steel. "We're talking about a culture shift here."