If you want to attract Gen Z employees
If you’re looking to hire Gen Z employees, tap into their entrepreneurial spirit. 72% of Gen Z have started or want to start a business someday, in contrast to 64$ of Gen Y. 51% of Gen Z want to be an employer, not an employee; this contrasts with 43% of Gen Y.
Gen Z are purposeful, self-directed, independent, and expect flexibility. Do your ads promise that they can challenge traditional ways and put their own stamp on products and services?
Your recruiting methods
Even more importantly, do you recruit Gen Z employees digitally, through 2-way live-streaming initiated online? Are you utilizing YouTube, Google+, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and an interactive website in your recruiting?
Here’s what you need to realize.
Gen Z employees, the oldest of which is 27, grew up fast. September 11, the War on Terror, severe economic recession, and the pandemic all occurred in their childhood and career formative years.
They’re highly educated, technologically savvy digital natives, and more realistic than their Gen X and Y parents and siblings. They see themselves as the solution to problems. They care about social justice and want to make an impact.
They want information now and will checked your company out before they apply. How will your website and recruiting methods and processes stack up? What can you offer them that will appeal?
If you found this post useful, you’ll like chapter 10, “Tailoring Your Accountability Management Strategies to Gen X, Y, and Z in Managing for Accountability: A Business Leader’s Toolbox. https://bit.ly/3CTFTKV. If you want to ensure you hire accountable employees, check out Chapter 3: The Tools You Need to Attract Quality Applicants and Screen for Accountability.
(c) 2022 Lynne Curry
Subscribing to the blog is easy
If you’d like to get 3 to 5 posts a week delivered to your inbox (and NO spam), just add your email address below. (I’ll never sell it.) I’m glad you’ve joined this vibrant blog. Thank you!
Gen Z employees are the next generation at work and their older managers have to work on catching up with them on uses of social media and digital platforms. This means attitude adjustment instead of fear/threat/apprehension on the part of managers–already a challenge, even before selecting people to interview–and how will you do the interviews?! Lots of food for thought here.
This is scary! But it is not untypical of my experience knowing, raising and working with some Gen Z (and X and Y) people. Your ‘breakdown/assessment’ is pretty right-on in my experience. But I view it a bit differently than you.
The 72% want to own the company NOW! They don’t want to start at the bottom and work their way up. They are the classic example of the old saw about teenagers – they know everything now, why should they learn more or your way of doing things. But, more than any Generation before, the latest crop has conflated views and understanding of the way things should be. They’ve GOT RIGHTS and if they don’t have a RIGHT to do or be or say, they want them; there’s little or less concern about the enforced impositions on everyone else by what I (underline/BOLD) want. Reciprocally, the attitude is ‘don’t make me do THAT, if I don’t want to!’ These concepts are mutually contradictory.
They’re “highly educated, technologically savvy digital natives” and married to their damned PDA’s. They literally have an area of their brain that shuts down every five minutes until they check their life status on their phone. And their hands fit that little device that fits in their hand and not on the handle of a hammer, shovel, tape measure or some other tool that doesn’t have a QWERTY somewhere within.
They’re liable to be quite fragmented in their attention to what YOU NEED THEM TO DO, because their handheld-link-to-life has someone asking or saying something to them. They become easily and readily distracted because their electronically fed brain tells them that someone else has made a comment about something they have to get involved in. “OMG, Mary just got dissed by Bill” – this has me completely distracted and absorbed!
And, not inconsistent with the ‘want to own their own company’ and ‘they see themselves as the solution to problems’, they want to work their own schedule, and do it their way consistent with ‘owners can set their own hours, breaks and terms.’ Likewise, ‘they are “more realistic than their Gen X and Y parents and siblings” and have inflated measures of worth. They’ve been ‘rewarded achievers’ since they woke up. They can’t ‘fail’ or ‘fail to measure up’ because that might hurt their feelings and make them feel like they’re not as good as the others at something. Performance awards/rewards have been given to the most substandard of them for just showing up – even if it was late. “No child left behind” has left no child held back because the minimum standards are lowered to below the bottom of the barrel. All too often, their Gen X and Y counterparts have lived in the progressively more liberal and ‘who cares’ lifestyles to the point that they are completely unaware of the world around them. Oh yeah, they have heard about and read about the incidents, and some have ‘lived some of them’. But they have also been exposed and influenced by those activities to the point that they’ve become inured to it all; some even have become incentivized by them and emulate or imitate the perpetrators. Fifty, or forty, or thirty years ago the thought of some high school kid taking an automatic weapon to school or a public area and taking their frustrations out on an innocent – or perceived adversarial – group of people wasn’t even a dream in some idiots mind. The kids of my day (born in 1950) carried guns to school, put them in their locker, and took a few shots at rabbits or squirrels on the way home. Violence, at about a 10% rate comparable to today’s violence in frequency, intensity and effect, was a couple of students (male or female) having a fistfight/hair-pulling contest ‘out back.’
And, while there was hazing to a degree, NOTHING could compare with some of the bullying – partly made much easier with those wonderful PDA’s – and gang activities of these days.
And then there’s drugs. Back in the day…smoking a cigarette was the big deal. Nowadays, then Gen Z group has had lots of exposure to DEADLY (not that cigarettes aren’t eventually deadly) drugs and users and promoters surrounding them. With the nearly universal legality and acceptance of pot, while I’m not going to argue it as a ‘step-up’ drug, it is generations further ahead of the cigarettes in sealing some fates. The peer pressures are incredibly higher and the potential to get ‘sucked in’ to the drug scene is incredibly higher; ergo, then likelihood of making a life-altering move is much higher. Drugs and the illicit activities that come with them can completely destroy the future for those who delve in them. One possession charge can change employ-ability; more or higher involvement can get one into the ‘theft-for-money-to-feed-the-habit’ cycle; anyone generating a court record (and I do believe that ‘juvenile records’ SHOULD NOT BE SEALED so they can be considered when reviewing their suitability for employment) can lock themselves out of many potential fields of employment. Rightfully so. Or they could simply end up dead.
And I’ll stop there. I don’t want to get started on the ‘social justice’ theme. Let’s just say ‘let bygones by bygones’ and stop claiming that everyone has to like and accept everyone. Tolerance is one thing; being forced to kiss the feet of anyone and everyone because they want to be accepted no matter what they think or say is just not life. I (I wish I could underline and BOLD that), as an individual just like everyone else is, need to be allowed to accept those things I want to accept, endorse those things I want to endorse, and NOT BE FORCED to accept those things I don’t want to. THAT should be the right of everyone; it’s HUMAN NATURE. By forcing me to accept anything you want to force upon me – no matter how wonderful or abhorrent I believe it to be – you are imposing something on me that I may not care for. Reciprocally, I should not force anything upon you that you are not willing to assume yourself. My rights stop just short of your face; as your rights should stop just short of mine.
There are a few good Gen Z people out there. But, based on the condition of our society these days, not enough to turn us around to get back to the way things were (exclusive of the discrimination). Simple, NOT ADJUDICATED, tolerance and acceptance should be the rule. For every single rule/law/edict demanding that any ONE does anything, there is an entire segment of society that is probably being negatively infringed upon because that ONE’s rights are wrong. Humanity has never been black and white. And it never can be. It has always been shades of those colors.