Hiring Generation Z is ‘a nightmare’

Some don’t turn up to their first day of work and others are barely able to get through an interview, finds Charlotte Gill

nightmare” is how James Mc N e i l d e s c r i b e s hi s experience working with members of Generation Z.

Many young workers are barely able to get through an interview, are unwilling to pick up the phone and have even ghosted their new companies completely on the first day of their jobs, according to exasperated employers.

McNeil, 38, had been in charge of a sales team of an organisation collecting music royalties from businesses and often he received job applications from 20-somethings to join the company.

“We’d book interviews [but] people wouldn’t turn up, or they’d turn up late, or they’d turn up and were wildly unprepared,” says McNeil, who now runs Ready2Lease, a car leasing firm. “They didn’t know anything about what they were doing, what they were there for.”

Jade Arnell, 37, shares McNeil’s exasperation with Gen Z- ers. She’s wary of making generalisations – one of the best employees at her firm, Rebellion Marketing, is part of this generation – but says she has had to let go of four others because they were unreliable.

Generation Z, which is defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, and currently aged between 12 and 27, has become one of the most talked-about cohorts economically and socially.

It’s no wonder. According to the World Economic Forum, they are expected to make up a quarter of the comments like] my old job was cr--. My manager was horrible, I hated it, and things like that, which, as an employer, turned you off straight away.”

Once recruited, he says, “we had two occasions where I hired people, one was not even a junior role but a senior sales role. It wasn’t a high- end role but it was £35,000 a year, company car, laptop, phone; a decent position for somebody.

“On both occasions on the first day, they just didn’t show up. They never responded to us again, never answered the phone, never replied to email, nothing. Just vanished off the face of the Earth.”

Others were “afraid of getting on the phone” and thought “that everything should just be done via email or text”, McNeil says. “Back in the day when I first started in sales, everything was done by phone; email was a secondary thing. They wouldn’t want to pick up the phone and speak to somebody because they didn’t like that one-to-one conversation or confrontation sometimes. They’re good with technology, but not good with life skills.”

Arnell describes her experience with Gen Z as “pretty poor”. She takes pride in the flexibility of her marketing business, where staff have freedom around what hours they work, can take 32 days of holiday and train in new areas, supported by the company.

However, she believes Gen Z members took advantage of the culture. “They want everything and deliver nothing in return,” she adds. “They don’t seem to be that a-- ed about anybody else but their own personal space and experience, and what they need and want. There doesn’t seem to be any bigger picture thinking.”

At worst, Arnell says, “I’ve had situations multiple times with people that have literally gone out with their friends all day on the p--- and then basically done their work at 3am in the morning, drunk, and then couldn’t understand why that was unacceptable.” They would even admit what they had been up to, according to Arnell.

“Until they reach a certain age, I think they just can’t work remotely; they need to be in an office environment. Even though they claim that they want the freedom and the flexibility, they’re not structured themselves to actually be disciplined.”

McNeil found Gen Z workers repeatedly asking for flexible working, and says they had “an automatic assumption they could work from home”. He describes it as a “consistent battle of trying to get people into the office”.

McNeil and Arnell are wary from their experiences; nowadays Arnell takes longer to interview people applying to work at her company. McNeil blames Gen Z’s woes on technology making “things too easy for people, so that when [ it] fails, they don’t know how to get around it” and schools not teaching enough teenagers about “the real world”.

Shoshanna Davis, 27, founder of Fairy Job Mother, a consultancy helping

One hired for a senior sales role with car, laptop and phone did not turn up

Gen Z-ers are predicted to make up a quarter of the workforce by 2025