A new study has found that businesses are axing Gen Z employees just months after being hired from college.
If sweeping judgements offend you, maybe stop reading this now. According to a new study conducted by Intelligent.com, six-in-10 employers surveyed admitted to getting rid of recent college graduate recruits within months of giving them a job, with one in seven stating they might not hire fresh graduates next year as a result of growing problems with young workers. Poor motivation, unprofessional attitudes and a lack of initiative were cited as the leading reasons for dismissing these hopefuls.
It’s a familiar headline in some corners of the media. Gen Z are ‘notorious’ for their lack of grounding in the realities of life on our planet, hyper-sensitivity bordering on liberal neuroses, and a sense of entitlement long before they have the right to feel entitled. Along with the equally problematic Millennials, these are the same people who complain about not being able to buy a house while throwing their disposable income on overhyped soy pistachio lattes rather than something sensible. Like a deposit. Or maybe the problem is really all about perspective.
According to Guy Thornton, Founder of Practice Aptitude Tests, there are several things management and C-suite can try and do to weed out the jokers and non-starters and identify the young candidates worth taking a chance on. Aptitude testing means assessing the creative thinking and problem solving skills of young hopefuls before giving them a job, and management can be tailored based on those results. As we learn more about how someone works best, we can adjust our own approaches to better suit them, in turn meaning it’s more likely we will get what we want from their work.
Communication and collaboration are also big learnings from aptitude testing — analysis can tell you how well someone can explain themselves, update colleagues, or if they understand how to ask for help. You should also be able to tell how suited someone is to a specific situation, not just the role itself. Gen Z are famed for their ability to quickly adapt to changing environments and hit the ground running, less so handling the monotony of The Way Things Are and Always Have Been in many places of work.
And herein lies the issue with our apparent willingness to discard and cast off within a relatively short period of time after hiring. Gen Z are not Gen X, nor Boomers. They haven’t grown up in an era when air travel was a novelty and work meant 9-to-5. They’ve come of age in a time that’s so connected it blows your mind and career paths are rarely linear because industries and economies are evolving at such a rapid pace. They see the world as a place they can do business from, not the office, and entire job titles disappear overnight, quickly replaced by something new.
So we may consider someone unfit for the professional traditions we’re accustomed to, but within the blink of an eye there’s a very good chance we will soon be considered just as out of place in the world today. The emerging economy needs flexibility, adaptability, individual thinking and people who can open their laptop and get their job done in all manner of settings. Rather than people who are fastidious about clocking in and taking absolutely no more than 30 minutes for lunch.
Managers who fail to recognise this often betray an outmoded business model at their company, and there’s a good chance they will struggle in tomorrow’s world. More so, managers who are willing to write off a young person within a few months of graduating, unless they are quite literally the worst hire in the world, reveal their own lack of patience, empathy and interest in up-skilling people. All traits we would consider essential for any boss-level staff member worth their weight in bonuses. By all means, then, run the aptitude tests, they’re definitely going to improve your intake. However, in many cases there may also be questions we need to ask of ourselves when complaining about how hard it is to find the ‘good graduates’.
