Commentary: Stop Asking How To Manage Gen Z

Last autumn, I was in a room with a group of senior talent acquisition leaders from major companies across consulting, finance, and technology. We were talking about the new generation entering the workforce, and within ten minutes the familiar complaints about Gen Z began to surface. They lack resilience. They do not want to do the hard yards. They leave after eighteen months. They ask about work-life balance in the first interview. They ask too many questions.

I listened and found myself thinking that we were looking at the same generation and somehow seeing completely different people.

Every day, I see students navigating recruitment processes and making their first important career decisions. My team speaks to them constantly, formally and informally, and over the past year we have also conducted focus groups to better understand what they expect from employers and from work itself. What emerges is very different from the portrait of an impatient, entitled generation that has become so common.

THEY’RE INTERVIEWING YOU, TOO

I see a generation that arrives at an interview having already done its due diligence. They have researched the company in much the same way they would research an important purchase or investment. They know its Glassdoor score. They have read what its CEO has said publicly. They have looked at its commitments on diversity, sustainability, employee well-being, and social impact. More importantly, they are looking for inconsistencies between what an organization says and what it actually does.

That is why one of the most revealing criticisms I hear about Gen Z is that they ask too many questions during interviews. It tells us something important, but perhaps not about the candidates. For decades, recruitment largely operated on the assumption that the employer was assessing the candidate. Gen Z increasingly approaches recruitment as a process of mutual assessment. The company is interviewing them, but they are also interviewing the company.

This is why I think we are asking the wrong question about this generation. We keep asking how employers should manage Gen Z, motivate them, retain them, or adapt them to the workplace. A more interesting question is what Gen Z is revealing about the changing contract between employers and employees.

WHAT THE TENURE NUMBERS DON’T SAY

Consider one of the statistics most frequently used to illustrate the supposed Gen Z loyalty problem. According to Randstad’s 2025 Global Workforce Report, Gen Z’s average tenure during the first five years of a career is 1.1 years, compared with 1.8 years for Millennials, 2.8 for Gen X, and 2.9 for Baby Boomers. It is easy to look at those numbers and conclude that loyalty is disappearing.

But tenure alone tells us very little about motivation. The same research points to the lack of visible growth opportunities as an important reason young employees leave. Where career paths are clearer, development is tangible, and employees can understand how a role contributes to their longer-term trajectory, retention is stronger.

That distinction matters. If young people are leaving simply because they become bored after eighteen months, employers have a generational problem. If they are leaving because they cannot see what happens after eighteen months, employers may have an organizational design problem.

WELL-BEING AND HARD WORK AREN’T OPPOSITES

The same distinction applies to the idea that Gen Z wants an easier working life. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey identifies meaning, money, and well-being as three of the major factors shaping career decisions. Our conversations with hundreds of students over the past year point in a similar direction. What they repeatedly ask for is not necessarily less demanding work. They want greater clarity about what an organization stands for, how their contribution matters, what they can learn, and where a role can take them.

One student described two very different internship experiences. In one organization, constant pressure eventually made her question whether she wanted to remain there. In another, she experienced a workplace where psychological safety and mental health were taken seriously. What struck her was not that people worked less in the second organization. It was that feeling safe made people more willing to work hard and more engaged with what they were doing.

That is an important distinction because discussions about Gen Z frequently frame well-being and performance as opposing forces. For many of the students we speak with, they are closely connected. They are not necessarily asking employers to lower expectations. They are asking why high expectations should require a poor working environment.

CLEAR-EYED ABOUT AI

Their attitude toward artificial intelligence offers another useful challenge to the stereotypes surrounding this generation. Gen Z is sometimes portrayed as the generation that will uncritically outsource everything to AI. At the same time, there is another narrative suggesting that young people are terrified that AI will eliminate the careers they are preparing to enter. In reality, both attitudes can coexist.

Deloitte’s 2025 research found that 60% of Gen Z respondents believe generative AI could eliminate jobs, with concern even higher among frequent users. Yet many are already actively using AI to improve their own capabilities. They can see the threat and the opportunity simultaneously.

A Computer Science and AI student described AI as a tool comparable to Google Scholar. It can be extraordinarily useful, she explained, but you still need to check your sources, understand where the information comes from, and exercise your own judgment. I found that observation interesting because it is far removed from the image of an uncritical, digitally dependent generation.

A GENERATION OF SKEPTICS

In fact, skepticism may be one of Gen Z’s defining characteristics. This is a generation that grew up surrounded by social media, misinformation, algorithmic recommendations, financial instability, climate anxiety, and increasingly visible debates about the behavior of institutions. They have learned to question what they see. It should not surprise us that they bring the same instinct into the workplace.

This is particularly visible when it comes to corporate values. One of the clearest themes emerging from our conversations with students is their sensitivity to the difference between genuine and performative action. A company can publish extensively about employee well-being, sustainability, or diversity, but young employees will compare those statements with what they experience.

As one Communication student put it when discussing corporate initiatives: “When efforts are super performative, and that is what becomes the industry norm, it exacerbates a feeling of worthlessness and devalues the cause itself.”

That is not simply a complaint about working conditions. It is a sophisticated observation about organizational credibility. Companies have spent years becoming better at communicating their purpose and values. The unintended consequence is that employees have also become better at holding them accountable for those promises.

SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD

Perhaps this is where much of the generational tension actually originates. Gen Z may not want fundamentally different things from previous generations. Previous generations also wanted meaningful work, good managers, fair compensation, opportunities to progress, and employers they could respect. The difference is that Gen Z is much more willing to make those expectations explicit.

They ask during the interview. They discuss salary with colleagues. They post about workplace experiences. They read and write Glassdoor reviews. They question corporate decisions publicly. What previous generations may have learned to want quietly, Gen Z is more comfortable articulating openly.

It is tempting to interpret that explicitness as entitlement. But we should also ask whether the silence of previous generations was really evidence that they were more satisfied with work. In many cases, it may simply have reflected a different balance of power between employers and employees, and different social norms about what could be discussed openly.

A HARDER MARKET TO BREAK INTO

There is also an economic reality that tends to disappear from discussions about Gen Z resilience. Randstad’s analysis of 126 million global job postings found a significant decline in entry-level positions requiring zero to two years of experience since early 2024, including particularly sharp declines in areas such as technology and finance. At the same time, almost half of Gen Z respondents in Deloitte’s 2025 survey said they did not feel financially secure.

Young graduates are therefore entering a labor market in which some traditional entry points are becoming harder to access at exactly the moment when AI is raising questions about which junior tasks, and potentially which junior roles, will continue to exist. They face high housing and living costs in many of the cities where the most attractive graduate jobs are concentrated, while being told that they will probably need to reskill repeatedly throughout their careers.

Seen in that context, asking about salary, progression, flexibility, or job security in an interview looks somewhat different. It may not be evidence of entitlement. It may simply be rational behavior in response to greater uncertainty.

WHERE BUSINESS SCHOOLS COME IN

For business schools, this matters because we sit directly between these two worlds. We spend a great deal of time helping students understand employers, prepare for recruitment processes, build the skills companies need, and communicate their value effectively. But perhaps we also have a growing responsibility to help employers understand the generation of talent they are trying to recruit.

Career services have traditionally been expected to prepare students for the labor market. Increasingly, they can also become a place where the labor market learns about students.

That requires more than another employer survey about Gen Z. Companies need opportunities to hear directly from students, to understand why they make particular career decisions, what makes them reject an offer, what makes them stay, and how they interpret the signals companies send during recruitment. Business schools are in a particularly interesting position to facilitate that conversation because we observe students before, during, and after their transition into employment.

RETHINKING CAREER READINESS

It also requires us to reconsider what we mean by career readiness. Preparing students for work cannot mean teaching them simply to accommodate whatever organizations expect from them. Students need to understand that careers involve compromise, difficult periods, demanding managers, and work that will not always feel purposeful. Resilience remains essential.

But employers also need to recognize that recruitment has changed. For years, business schools have helped students learn how to articulate the value they can bring to an employer. Increasingly, employers need to become equally good at articulating the value they can bring to an employee.

Recruitment is becoming a process of reciprocal due diligence.

THE TRUST PARADOX

There is a final paradox in the discussion about Gen Z that I find particularly interesting. This generation is often described as distrustful of institutions, yet research from Edelman has consistently shown the relatively important position employers occupy in the trust landscape. Young people still believe companies have the capacity to make a positive difference in their lives and in society.

But high trust can create high expectations. If you believe an institution has the power to do better, you are more likely to be disappointed when it does not. What employers sometimes interpret as cynicism may therefore be something more complicated: the reaction that follows when an organization fails to live up to expectations that young employees genuinely believed it could meet.

This also helps explain why loyalty has not disappeared as much as it has become conditional. Gen Z appears willing to commit, but it is more deliberate about where that commitment is placed. Employers that provide visible opportunities to grow, communicate honestly, give young employees meaningful responsibility, and behave consistently with their stated values are unlikely to find this generation impossible to retain.

THE WORKPLACE WE NOW NEED

Last autumn, I did not say all of this in that room. The conversation moved on, as these conversations tend to do. But I have continued to think about the students navigating their first hiring processes while some of the same companies recruiting them are simultaneously developing Gen Z retention strategies and privately complaining about Gen Z expectations.

There is clearly a disconnect, and it runs in both directions. Young people also need to understand the realities and constraints facing employers. But when we reduce the debate to whether Gen Z is resilient enough, loyal enough, or willing enough to work hard, we miss the more interesting transformation taking place.

Gen Z may not be rewriting the fundamental things people want from work. They may simply be making those expectations more visible, at precisely the moment when technology, economics, and changing social norms are making the old employment contract less sustainable.

Instead of asking how we can make Gen Z fit the workplace we inherited, business schools and employers might learn more by asking what this generation is telling us about the workplace we now need to build.

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Ines Drieselmann is Vice President, Alumni & Careers at IE University in Spain. She is a board member of the IE Foundation and a Quality Assurance Academy Instructor at EFMD Global in Brussels, Belgium. 

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