Opinion
I didn’t get a job because I’m Gen Z. Why did that happen?
Jonathan Rivett
Careers contributorI recently asked a hiring manager why I’d missed out on a job I was interviewed for. They said they wanted to be straight with me and admitted they went with the older shortlisted candidate because the panel had reservations about hiring a Gen Z.
I appreciated the honesty – it seemed like the sort of thing that could get you in trouble if the person you said it to was interested in legal action (I’m not). But I was still shocked. I thought this sort of thing only happened in tabloid stories about how lazy or bad with money younger generations are.
Why would a serious organisation make a decision based on a stereotype?
It might seem like your potential employer was discriminating against your youth, but the truth is probably more complex.Credit: John Shakespeare
My first reaction to your email was that this was an open-and-shut case. You were marked down based on an arbitrary category. The hiring manager had stepped into the barren wasteland of generational pseudoscience. You had every right to be upset.
I still think you were likely treated unfairly, but after I spoke with Dr Dan Woodman, it became clear that entirely ignoring someone’s birthdate may not be the virtuous path I’d assumed it was. Dr Woodman is TR Ashworth professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne.
“A charitable interpretation would be that an employer who doesn’t have the most finesse with language was trying to get a point across about the other candidate having more experience or being further into their career,” he says.
“But if they were buying into a stereotype that a large cohort is less employable or problematic than another … well, [for] one, that’s a huge proportion of the workforce in the near future that they don’t want to hire. But also it’s getting the generational factors completely wrong.”
Professor Woodman explained that the mistake some people make when it comes to generations is talking about an entire group as if they’re one person with one set of attitudes and attributes. That’s how we get to an idea like “the avocado toast generation”.
“But any group of that size – 20 per cent of the population – is going to have as much diversity within it as any similarities that the fact of being young at a particular time might give them,” Woodman said. And, when you think about it, the 15-odd years that separate popularly conceived generational categories – Boomers, Gen Xs, etc – is in many ways absurdly large.
A Millennial (or Gen Y), for example, could be like me: born in the early 80s, with a childhood full of cassette tapes, Telecom landline phones and exhortations to send a “stamped, self-addressed envelope” to your favourite (standard definition) TV show.
Or they could be born in the late 1990s, and have grown up knowing a world where the internet and digital technology was utterly ubiquitous. Similarly, a Gen Z could be several years into their career, like you, or still in primary school.
Woodman made it clear, however, that your birthdate is not irrelevant to the world of work. Or, to be more specific, “how you think about your work will be shaped by the time you live in”.
Experiences and conditions specific to a period or place inevitably shape humans. And when they affect a particular group (as opposed to the whole population), they’re what social science researchers call cohort effects.
“If we’re talking about some Gen Zs, then these are people relatively new to the workforce and also people who copped some of the worst effects of the challenges we faced during the pandemic,” he says.
“If employers are treating individuals on their merits and using some kind of … you might want to call it generational intelligence – understanding that the world has changed and experiences will be different – then that’s OK.”
So, answering your question, a serious organisation simply wouldn’t make a hiring decision based on a vulgar stereotype like “all Gen Somethings are lazy” or “all Gen Somethings are entitled”.
They might, however, take into consideration the societal factors – the period and cohort effects – that influence people’s lives. And they could make better-informed decisions based on them.
Send your Work Therapy questions to jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.