Why So Many Companies Are Firing Gen-Z Employees

BY SYDNEY SLADOVNIK, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @SYDNEYSLADOVNIK

Gen-Z’s entrance into the workplace hasn’t been entirely smooth. Roughly 60 percent of companies have cut Gen-Z employees they hired this year, according to education and career advisory platform Intelligent.

Of the 966 businesses surveyed, 75 percent said that their young workers had “unsatisfactory” performances. Respondents believe that their postgrad new hires lack motivation (50 percent) and professionalism (46 percent), and have poor communication skills (39 percent). All of this is weighing on employers as they think about hiring postgrads next year: Fifteen percent are either unsure or planning not to hire postgrads in 2025. Readiness for the workplace and past negative experiences were two of the main reasons for the hesitation, according to the survey.

The transition into the workplace for Gen-Zers has been bumpy, to say the least, but they aren’t the first to travel this course. Millennials received plenty of grief as they entered the workforce and were similarly accused of lacking work ethic not long ago. Of course, they’ve ascended to managerial roles and the C-suite, and forged their own paths in entrepreneurship.

Cole Porterfield, 24, a recent graduate from Westminster University, argues that the corporate world has Gen-Z all wrong. He told Inc. via TikTok message that six out of his 10 college friends have been laid off in the past month—three just this week—many of whom he believes to be “super smart and passionate” about their vocation. They worked in a variety of industries such as UX research, marketing, teaching, and financial accounting, and were laid off for budget cuts or performance. “It’s just so incredibly competitive for these positions that don’t even really pay living wages because they’re exploiting young talent,” he says.

Differing communication styles

Tenley Uttenreuther, 24, landed a job at Afterpay after graduating from Oregon State University in 2021. She interned with the San Francisco-based fintech company before her sophomore year of college, which turned into a contract position through the pandemic, before she joined the marketing team full time as a fresh grad in the spring of 2022. She was one of 1,000 Afterpay employees who were laid off this year.

In addition to growing with the company over the course of four years, Uttenreuther was the type of employee to open her Slack at 6:30 a.m. most days, she says. She was on a morning sunrise walk to get coffee with her roommate and did her routine check on Slack when she saw a companywide layoff announcement. Minutes later, she learned her role was impacted and was locked out of her company accounts soon thereafter.

“I think my instant feeling was a sense of betrayal,” she says. Uttenreuther recalls sitting behind the CEO as one of the first five marketing hires in the brand’s early days and says she was brought on by the chief revenue officer at the time. She trained new hires, some of whom kept their jobs, and felt a strong sense of identity and pride in her work, which made the news feel “even more like a stab in the back,” she says. “I respect the business decision, I know it’s not personal, but you can’t help but feel that [way] in the moment.”

Now with a few professional years of experience under her belt, Uttenreuther has a few takeaways from the workplace, the first of which is that there is a divergence in generational communication styles. While Millennials might opt for a gentler approach, she prefers direct, honest feedback and constructive criticism. “Tell it to me straight,” she says. “I don’t want to be told I’m doing a great job all the time. There are things that I can improve on.”

Uttenreuther also argues that many of her peers are hard workers and thinks Gen-Z gets “a really bad rap.” She admits she felt like she said yes to too many things, which resulted in her frequently staying up all night to finish a project out of fear of underdelivering. While she takes that as a lesson to better manage her time, she’s still motivated to work hard. “I just want to learn. I want to feel like I’m always growing and becoming better every single day,” she says.

Work-life balance

Carter Abdallah, a 24-year-old software engineer at Nvidia-owned Brev.dev, has a similar mindset. He credits his parents for instilling in him a strong work ethic, which motivated him to pursue computer science at Georgia Tech, secure internships in school, and move to San Francisco for his first tech job. He also uses his social media platform to create content as a side gig, but he says that not all Gen-Zers are willing to hustle beyond the standard 40 hours a week as he is.

“Hell, yeah, I work more than 40 hours—way more than 40 hours,” he says, which is shocking to most of his followers. The sentiment he says he more often hears from his generation is that working after 5 p.m. is unacceptable and most people want to do only what’s required, and not an ounce more. In his mind, that approach might create a good work-life balance, but it isn’t what’s going to lead to a life with a ton of disposable income and vacations. Abdallah points out that social media may have misled his generation about the kind of lifestyles that are attainable, like million-dollar vacations and weddings on Lake Como: “The people who have those things usually had a period of no work-life balance.“

He’s not focused on having the perfect work-life balance right now because his perspective as an early-career 20-something is that “you don’t have a lot of skills, but you have a lot of time.” With that time, he’s focused on making a name for himself. He preaches that sentiment to his followers. “You have to prove yourself, which means you have to stand out. And part of standing out is oftentimes either doing the work that nobody wanted to do or working harder than your peers,” he says.

Showcasing that hustle mentality is hard to do from home, which is a hurdle that Gen-Z is struggling to get over, Abdallah adds. He says that a lot of Gen-Zers are looking for a hybrid job, or a role that offers some flexibility, but they don’t realize how valuable in-person work can be for professional relationships. “I don’t recommend remote work for people who are just starting their career, because it’s very difficult to build connections,” he says. Those connections are helpful for careers, and can be the difference between getting a new job and not.

Abdallah adds that his comments are often filled with followers saying that Gen-Z is the future of work, which implies that their preferences should be heard now. “One day, hopefully Gen-Zers will be the ones calling the shots, and work will change and all of that stuff,” he says. “But it’s going to be a gradual transition.”

Inevitable growing pains

Change in any environment takes time, and Gen-Z is coming to terms with that fact in the workplace, according to Grace McCarrick, the Millennial founder of people and culture company Grace Note Strategies. She hosts soft skill workshops for corporations and believes the greatest discrepancy between Gen-Z and employers is psychological differences stemming from the way they were raised. In the U.S., Gen-Z has been referred to as the “anxious generation” and grew up in the 24/7 news cycle. Parents who were nervous about crime consequently raised their kids with more structure and supervision than generations before. They might not consciously want handholding, but “a lot of Gen-Zers are expecting to be sort of parented by their managers,” McCarrick says.

That doesn’t mean they’re impossible to train—it just means managers have to take a different approach. Gen-Zers argue that they have the technical and field knowledge from going to school, but training soft skills now falls on employers, especially in a post-pandemic environment, says McCarrick. “People’s social muscles are so depleted, and Gen-Z wasn’t raised [with] the same social skills as someone who was raised in the ’70s or ’80s,” she adds. Social media is a major part of Gen-Z’s socialization and self-expression, so a compromise companies can make is developing social media literacy around the workplace, she says.

Growing pains are inevitable in any transition, but McCarrick says roughly a year is a good tell of whether an employee is a good fit. As far as work ethic goes, she adds that Gen-Z is really no different than any other generation new to the workforce. “When you’re early in the workplace, everything you do feels wrong, like all the mistakes feel big. It’s so frustrating,” which is a universal feeling that Gen-Z is just now getting a taste for, McCarrick says. “Gen-Z is just talking about it more on the internet.”

Gen-Z is essentially coping with its introduction to corporate work culture. What’s different is this generation was raised to be change-makers—influencing the way businesses think about corporate responsibility, diversity, and climate change. Of course, they want to change work culture, too.

Still, they will need to adapt to their new environment. “I think Gen-Z wants to come in and play the game exactly the way they want to play it,” McCarrick says. “And sometimes, if you’re coming into a game where a bunch of other people are playing, you’ve got to play the way they play first.”

Photo Credit: Getty Images.