Why Hiring Gen Z Looks Broken and What to Do About It

Taking another look at hiring Gen Z when many managers are giving up on them

The generation that uses AI the most is the least confident about the job market. And they're not wrong.

For nearly two decades, younger Americans were the optimists about finding work. That changed in 2024. By 2025, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally, compared with 64% of those 55 and older. The youngest went from the most confident to the least, and the gap is still widening.

Their pessimism is not irrational. Entry-level hiring is down. AI is eliminating the roles they would have filled. The hiring managers who do bring on new graduates are firing them at alarming rates, and many are opting out of hiring them altogether.

But if no one hires them now, there will be no mid-level talent to draw from in a few years. Let's look at what you need to know about this generation, why neither hiring them nor keeping them is working, and how to make your next under-30 hire a success.

Table of contents

• Where they're coming from
• Why they're struggling to get hired and then getting fired
• Why you can't afford to skip them
• Rethinking how you evaluate candidates
• Making the hire stick
• Where that leaves you

Where they're coming from

A combination of the rise of AI and COVID combined to create the perfect storm for Gen Z. Understanding how these factors are impacting this generation will better inform your decisions and interactions with them.

The AI side

Gen Z's relationship with AI is unlike any other generation's. They use it more than anyone: 76% have used a tool like ChatGPT or Claude, and 51% reach for one weekly or daily. They also trust it less than anyone. Over the past year, excitement about AI among Gen Z dropped 14 points while anger rose 9, and nearly half now say its workplace risks outweigh the benefits. Forty-one percent report active anxiety about AI, and 70% feel overwhelmed by the constant churn of new technology at work. Most of them keep using it anyway, because opting out feels riskier than staying in.

AI is altering and removing the jobs they would have started in. Roughly 16,000 net entry-level positions disappear every month, concentrated in data entry, customer service, legal support, and billing. New grad hiring peaked in May 2022 and has fallen 44% since. That's the rung Gen Z would have stepped onto first.

The roles that remain are different ones. Among new grad hires, traditional starter titles like Software Engineer, Recruiter, Financial Analyst, and Sales Development Representative are all shrinking as a share of the market. In their place: AI Engineer at the top, and hands-on roles like Field Manager and Service Technician at the other end. For a generation told to go to college, get a degree, and follow a career path, the path itself is narrowing under their feet.

The COVID side

AI is the visible half of what's hitting this generation. The pandemic is the other half, and it started earlier. Gen Z includes anyone born between 1997 and 2012, putting them between 14 and 29 years old in 2026. Every one of them had critical years of development disrupted by the pandemic, and the effects are now showing up in the workplace.

Social-emotional skills measurably declined in college students who entered after the lockdowns compared to those who entered before. Half of Gen Z say their education did not prepare them for work, and 84% of hiring managers say most high school graduates aren't ready for the workforce either. Schools didn't deliver what work expects, and employers and students agree on that.

Internships took a hit too. They're one of the most reliable bridges between school and work, and they were widely disrupted during the pandemic. Graduates who complete an internship earn an average of $59,059 in their first job; those who don't earn $44,048. Eighty-three percent of recent grads say their internship helped prepare them for their career.

Masking caused its own developmental disruption, and the effects are showing up in your interview room. Some of the most common complaints hiring managers raise about this generation, including poor eye contact, flat expression, and difficulty with small talk, have well-documented roots in what masks did to social development. During the years many Gen Z were in school, masks significantly impaired emotion recognition and face recognition in young adults. Researchers described the effect as "incredibly challenging to perceive each other's facial expressions," the building blocks of normal social interaction.

Masks also reduced facial mimicry of happy expressions. That mimicry, the unconscious imitation of another person's expression, is how people build rapport and interpersonal closeness. By the time these candidates show up across the table from you, the practice gap is years old.

You may have already seen the end result. The "Gen Z stare," a deadpan, unresponsive expression delivered in place of verbal acknowledgment, went viral in 2025 and now has its own Wikipedia page. Six in ten companies have avoided hiring a Gen Z candidate over professionalism concerns, including poor communication, lack of eye contact, and difficulty with workplace small talk. This generation is entering the workforce carrying the psychological imprint of a pandemic that interrupted their final years of high school and early college, the window when professional socialization typically forms.

This is the cohort showing up for the entry-level jobs that are left.

Why they're struggling to get hired and then getting fired

All of this shows up in your hiring funnel. Interviews tend to go badly, the hires who make it through often don't last, and a growing number of hiring managers have quietly stopped trying.

What's happening in interviews

Older generations learned to read faces. Whether it's a wide smile, a nod, a crinkle at the eyes, or a small shift, we count on it a lot. But faces are only part of it. Interviews are synchronous, in person, and high stakes. They test exactly the communication mode that Gen Z had the least practice with. For many of them, years of face masks, lockdowns, and time at home overlapped with the years those skills are normally developed. They grew up communicating through screens, and they're good at it. An interview doesn't let them show that.

They also walk in carrying the lowest confidence about finding work that any cohort of young Americans has had in nearly two decades. For most of the past twenty years, younger Americans were more optimistic about the job market than older Americans. That flipped in 2024, and the gap is still widening. An interview is hard enough without walking in already certain the market has decided against you.

Candidates and hiring managers see the same problem from different sides. A third of Gen Z say they don't know how to communicate effectively with hiring managers. On the other side of the table, nearly a quarter of hiring managers say recent graduates are unprepared for the interview process itself. The most commonly cited issues are trouble with eye contact (49%), dressing appropriately (42%), and asking for reasonable compensation (38%).

Sometimes the candidate really is a bad candidate. But if the same communication issues keep showing up across an entire generation, it's time to reassess how you're framing your interactions with them. The world changed, and they changed with it. Your interview process needs to account for that.

What happens after they're hired

Things don't always get better after the offer goes out. In a 2024 Intelligent.com survey of 966 hiring managers, 79% had put at least some recent graduate hires on performance improvement plans, and 60% had let them go. A separate Resume.org survey of 1,000 hiring managers asked why, and the top reasons were consistent:

• Lack of motivation or initiative (48%)
• Lack of professionalism (39%)
• Excessive phone use (39%)
• Poor time management (38%)
• An attitude of indifference (37%)

The same survey also flagged poor communication skills, difficulty accepting feedback, and inability to adapt to company culture as recurring issues beyond the top five.

Hiring managers describe the same pattern from a different angle. Thirty-three percent say recent grads lack work ethic, 29% call them entitled, 28% describe them as unmotivated, 27% say they're easily offended, and 25% report that they don't respond well to feedback.

Those numbers represent real cost: projects get derailed, teammates burn out, and hiring rounds restart. Some of the hires behind these numbers weren't going to work in any environment. Across an industry-wide pattern, though, the behaviors getting penalized in performance reviews are the same ones that practice would have built, and they don't show up before someone is in the role.

How hiring managers are responding

Hiring managers are responding to all of this by pulling back. One in eight now plans to avoid recent graduates entirely, preferring older and more experienced candidates. Only 58% of companies said they would even consider hiring from the most recent graduating class. Underemployment among recent college graduates reached nearly 43% by the end of 2025.

The result is two problems at once: a growing pool of educated young workers who can't find roles that match their qualifications, and a shrinking pipeline of entry-level talent for the companies that will need experienced workers five and ten years from now. The two feed each other.

Why you can't afford to skip them

Pulling back from entry-level hiring helps in the short term but builds a bigger problem down the line.

The pipeline math

With Gen Z projected to make up 30% of the global workforce by 2030, the workers being written off today are the mid-level leaders of 2031 and the senior leaders of 2036. New grad hiring is down 44% from its 2022 peak, while AI is removing entry-level roles at roughly 16,000 a month. Each missing hire today is a missing mid-level employee in five years, multiplied across the industry.

The standard counter is to wait and poach trained talent from competitors. The catch is that everyone is making the same calculation. The pool of trained mid-levels available to poach in five years will be roughly the size of the pool of entry-levels hired now, minus the ones their original employers managed to retain. The companies investing in development today are removing themselves from the future poaching pool entirely.

WeWork's CEO made a related point at Fortune's Workplace Innovation Summit, citing baby boomer retirement at the other end of the pipeline: "It's incumbent upon all of us to bring that talent in and to educate the talent and teach them to be the future growth of all our organizations." He added that AI "is not going to provide empathy and leadership and mentoring and all those skills that you need to lead a company for a company to be successful."

Workplace skills come from workplaces

The hiring problem is simpler than it usually sounds. The U.S. Department of Labor's own curriculum for teaching workplace skills combines classroom education with on-the-job experience, because classroom instruction alone does not produce the soft skills employers want. Work experience is how young people learn how to work.

Professionalism, communication, taking feedback, working through team dynamics: people build these at work. You cannot require them as prerequisites for someone's first job and then be surprised when nobody has them. That's the position much of the hiring market is in right now. The companies that figure this out first will have a functioning bench in five years.

Rethinking how you evaluate candidates

If what you're seeing in interviews is shaped by the environments this generation grew up in, the way you evaluate them needs to account for that.

Use structured interviews

Most hiring managers reach for years of experience as their main predictor of new-hire success. A meta-analysis of 25 common hiring criteria ranks it 23rd. Structured interviews, job-knowledge tests, and work samples all outperform it. Structured interviews specifically are nearly twice as effective at predicting job performance as the unstructured alternative. You ask every candidate the same questions in the same order and score them against a rubric you wrote before the first interview.

To build one:

• Identify the specific competencies you need for the role
• Write questions that target those competencies
• Create a scoring rubric before the first interview
• Ask every candidate the same questions in the same order
• Score answers against the rubric immediately after the interview, while your observations are still fresh

For a real example, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management publishes a structured interview question for evaluating interpersonal skills: "Describe a situation in which you dealt with individuals who were difficult, hostile, or distressed." Follow-up probes ask who was involved, what specific actions the candidate took, and what the outcome was. Answers are scored on a 1-to-5 scale anchored with behavioral examples at each level: a 1 might describe referring difficult employees to another staff member; a 5 might describe diffusing an emotionally charged meeting with external stakeholders.

Every interviewer is scoring against the same rubric you wrote before any answers came in. The score reflects what was actually said in the room.

Buffer publishes its hiring process and uses two structured interviews for every candidate. The first is on culture and values: same questions in the same order, scored against criteria the team set before any applications were reviewed. The second is on experience, tailored to the role, and often includes a brief practical exercise so the team can evaluate a work product as well as an interview answer.

Doing this takes more preparation than an unstructured interview. What you get for it is a more reliable read on whether someone can do the job, plus a meaningful legal advantage. In a comparison of discrimination lawsuits, 60% of cases involving unstructured interviews were ruled discriminatory; 100% of cases involving structured interviews were ruled non-discriminatory. For candidates who might interview worse than they would actually perform in the role, structure is what lets you see past surface impression.

Explain your evaluation process

Most candidates have no idea how they're being evaluated. Seventy percent of employers say they use skills-based hiring for entry-level roles, but fewer than 40% of graduating seniors are even familiar with the term. If your candidates don't understand what you're measuring or how, their performance will reflect that confusion as much as their actual ability.

A small group of companies have made this a public commitment. GitLab is the clearest example. Their Candidate Handbook, published openly on their corporate handbook site, walks every applicant through every stage of the hiring process before they ever apply. It names each stage in order (application, screening call, assessment, technical interview, team interviews, references, offer) and explains what each one is for, how long it takes, and what the candidate should expect.

GitLab also writes down things most companies leave unspoken. They acknowledge they can't respond to every candidate but commit to reviewing every application. They warn candidates that scammers impersonate GitLab recruiters and link to instructions on spotting fake outreach. They state the screening call lasts 30 to 40 minutes and that either side can end it if it isn't a fit. They commit that if a candidate misses an interview for reasons beyond their control, the rejection will be reversed.

The point of putting all of this in writing before anyone applies is to remove the asymmetry of information. The candidate knows what's coming, what's being measured, who decides, and what happens at each stage. They can prepare for the conversation that's actually in front of them.

You don't need GitLab's level of operational detail to start. The minimum useful version is a public page (or even a confirmation email) that lists your stages in order, what each one evaluates, how long the process takes, who the candidate will meet, and what to do if a stage doesn't go well. Some companies go further and share the rubric itself, the specific competencies they're scoring against. The candidates they hear back from tend to answer the question that's being asked, because they know what it is.

Adjust your interview expectations

The surface signals hiring managers flag in interviews, including flat expression, lack of eye contact, and difficulty with small talk, have documented developmental roots. A candidate who doesn't show enthusiasm the way you expect may have spent their formative years in environments where those behaviors were never modeled or practiced.

Jane Harper at The HR Digest recently fielded a question from a recruiter with over a decade of experience who couldn't read the "Gen Z stare" across the interview table. Harper's read: the stare is a coping mechanism. It's Gen Z processing or weighing words carefully when older interviewers expect performative enthusiasm. Her practical advice maps closely to what works in interviews like this: ask candidates to walk you through their thought process when silence stretches, swap broad open-ended questions for sharper specific ones, and let the quality of their thinking carry the evaluation.

When you're evaluating entry-level candidates, focus on capacity, curiosity, and willingness to learn. The polish you're used to seeing in mid-career hires gets built on the job. Look for the underlying drive that will build it. Ask questions that let them describe what they have actually done: a school project, a part-time job, an extracurricular role. Performing confidence under pressure tests a different skill than the job itself does.

If someone seems flat or nervous, give them a moment to settle in before launching into questions. A brief, genuine conversation at the start can help an anxious candidate settle into something closer to who they really are.

37signals, the company behind Basecamp, builds its entire interview process around this idea. Their interview rounds are deliberately conversational, with no brain teasers, no trick questions, and no surprise gauntlets. Candidates have described the interviews as "chatting about my background and Basecamp with colleagues." That conversational format is the design. For candidates who arrive with anxiety about being evaluated, it gets a closer read of who they actually are.

Making the hire stick

The first weeks and months after a new hire starts decide whether the hire works out or falls apart.

Invest in onboarding

Only 12% of employees rate their onboarding as excellent. The cost of skipping it shows up fast: over 30% of new hires leave within their first 90 days, and 44% regret starting a new job within the first week. Replacing an employee can cost up to 213% of their annual salary.

The return on doing it well is clear. Employees who go through strong onboarding are 58% more likely to still be at the company three years later, and companies with structured programs see up to 82% higher retention and 62% greater productivity from new hires. Even at companies that do invest, only 15% sustain onboarding past the first six months, despite the fact that 90% of retention decisions happen after that window closes. Only 36% of employers have a structured onboarding process in the first place.

The simplest structure that works is a 30-60-90 day plan:

• First 30 days: Learning. Understanding the organization, meeting the team, and getting familiar with tools and processes.
• Days 31 through 60: Skill development and collaboration. New hires start contributing to projects with support.
• Days 61 through 90: Building toward independence, with clear goals and regular feedback on progress.

Without that structure, new hires get overwhelmed, which is what pushes so many of them to check out in the first month. Remote onboarding amplifies the risk. Employees onboarded fully remotely are significantly more likely to resign, and intentional in-person time with mentors and established team members is what helps retention hold.

Doist, the company behind Todoist, builds a curated project for every new hire that maps their onboarding journey. New employees are also paired with a mentor for a week-long in-person co-working experience before they settle into remote work. The Todoist project keeps the onboarding structured and visible to their manager; the mentor week gives them real human connection before the rest of the job goes asynchronous.

The 30-60-90 day plan above is a working starting point. For a complete onboarding framework, Polymer has a full guide to employee onboarding.

Pair them with mentors

Mentorship is one of the most overlooked moves in onboarding. Eighty-three percent of Gen Z workers say a workplace mentor is important for their career. Only 52% report having one.

The companies that do invest see measurable returns. Ninety-one percent of those with mentorship programs report higher retention, and employees in mentoring programs have a 50% higher retention rate than those without.

Huy Nguyen, Chief Education and Career Development Advisor at Intelligent, points to mentorship as one of the highest-leverage moves a hiring manager can make for a recent grad. Pairing them with mentors, he writes, "can pay huge dividends" by providing "the guidance, feedback, and support for them to succeed."

A good mentor does not have to be a senior leader. A colleague who's been with the company for a year or two and remembers what it was like to be new can be just as effective. Give new hires someone they can go to with the questions they wouldn't bring to their manager, someone who can help them decode the unwritten rules that previous generations picked up through exposure this generation didn't have.

Set clear expectations and give structured feedback

For Gen Z hires, the window to get expectations right is narrow. Seventy percent of new hires know whether a job is a good fit within the first month.

From day one, be explicit about what success looks like in the role. Don't assume new hires will absorb expectations by watching the people around them, especially in remote or hybrid environments where they may have limited visibility into how the team actually operates.

Schedule regular check-ins, weekly in the first month and biweekly after that, and use them to give specific, actionable feedback in the moment. Waiting for a formal review costs you the window when feedback actually compounds. When you give feedback, make it concrete. "You need to be more professional" gives a new hire nothing to work with. "When you're in a client meeting, put your phone away and take notes" gives them something they can do differently tomorrow.

If a new hire reacts visibly to feedback, whether by going quiet, looking frustrated, or getting defensive about why they did something a certain way, give them space. A visible reaction is not the same as a refusal to listen. If they get defensive, ask them to think about it more and check back in a day or two. Watch what they do with the feedback the following week. The in-the-moment reaction is rarely the signal you think it is.

Onboarding, mentorship, and feedback are how a new hire learns what they need to learn. Previous generations often picked some of this up through other channels before they arrived at your door. Onboarding at most companies has been insufficient for a long time, treated as optional. With this generation, that no longer works.

Where that leaves you

For decades, employers expected new hires to arrive workplace-ready, and the system mostly delivered. Schools sent graduates with the social practice of group projects, classroom presentations, summer internships, and part-time jobs in places where people stood next to each other and learned how to handle other people. That system disappeared for a few years and we failed to change our expectations.

Hiring well now requires meeting this generation where they are. Evaluating these candidates fairly, hiring them carefully, and developing them deliberately is how you build the mid-level talent and leadership you'll need in the future.