Founder of First Principles Education, Emil helps students become self-navigating learners without relying on tuition.
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Hiring Gen-Z talents is like dating upward: You never know when they might leave you. In today's dynamic job market, career mobility is celebrated. Job-hopping every couple of years is an increasingly common advice given by career coaches on social media. With each job hop, the individual can secure new opportunities and a pay raise—a tempting proposition that can propel them to new heights. Tech-savvy Gen-Z talents also know how to leverage platforms like LinkedIn to always be on the lookout for better opportunities. This presents a persistent challenge for the team: How do you grow fast enough to keep giving everyone better opportunities each year?
It is a chicken-or-egg, catch-22 situation. Retaining top talents and fostering a cohesive team culture are typically needed for a company to grow rapidly. However, there will always be the allure of higher salaries and better opportunities elsewhere. This often lures talent away, leaving behind gaps that must be filled with recruits. Naturally, this can impede a company’s growth plans and make it less attractive for the remaining team members to stay in the company. This vicious cycle may continue infinitely and look impossible to break through.
At our education technology company, we rapidly grew tenfold in 2023. To maintain the harmony between employee growth and our company’s expansion, two key principles have served us well: getting clients to join our team and asking our Gen-Z team what they truly value in a job.
1. Understand the client’s needs by having a client onboard.
At our company, we help students nurture lifelong habits that allow them to become confident and independent learners. The nature of our business made us recognize the pivotal role mothers play in shaping their children's habit-building journey. Mothers understand intimately the struggles of motivating their children to study. Their insights provide valuable guidance in tailoring our services to meet the needs of frustrated parents. We figured the best way to know how a mother thinks is to have an actual mother on our team.
In our search for a young mother to join our team, we found an ideal candidate who also happens to be Gen-Z. Naturally, we were initially hesitant to have a young Gen-Z mother spearhead the crucial role of Head of Study Skills in our company. But this is my first piece of advice: Have faith in the Gen-Zs and do not simply do a token hire for the sake of diversity. I believe that for Gen-Z team members to feel important and like they can make an impact, they should be put in a position of power and responsibility. This empowered our new Head of Study Skills to tap into her youthfulness to connect with Millennial clients. This savviness with the mindsets of people like themselves can give Gen-Z leaders invaluable insights into how best to satisfy their clients. And these leaders will likely only keep getting better at their roles because there will naturally be more Gen-Zs becoming clients over the next few years.
2. Understand what Gen-Z wants in the workplace.
Because we only hire role-model scholars and honor students from top universities, the average age of our team of mentors is 21 years old. They are the Gen-Z talents that many employers struggle to retain, but we have been fortunate that our team has remained with us from the very beginning until today. What we have learned from working with them is that it is important to first meet their basic needs and then also help them meet their priorities in life.
Meeting their basic needs is often the easiest part: Simply pay them more. Benchmark your remuneration packages to be significantly higher than they would make as a Starbucks barista. I've found that hosting pizza parties to “boost morale" or having movie outings for “team bonding” does not work. Pay your Gen-Z team members enough to take pride in what they do.
But beyond just the basics, it is also important to have honest and open conversations with them about their priorities in life. When we hire top talents such as scholars, they usually already have a generous allowance from the scholarship they have been awarded. So, while their remuneration needs to be good enough for them not to feel short-changed, it is unlikely to be enough for them to want to stay with the team.
What we have gathered is that most Gen-Z value their own time and freedom over anything else. They want to be able to prioritize their mental health, hobbies, commitments and more. One way to address this is to offer a work-from-home arrangement, which can help give them room to achieve their personal goals. However, there are two big hurdles that need to be overcome in this scenario.
The first hurdle is the expectations from the clients: Some clients may insist on the traditional format of physical meetings, which would render a work-from-home arrangement unfeasible. However, I recommend taking the chance to educate clients on the benefits of taking their interactions online. We stood with our employees and prioritized their personal goals, and in return, it allowed us to attract the top talents. These talents, because of their work-from-home arrangements, were also in better physical and mental states to do their best for our clients. Everyone wins.
The second hurdle is that leadership needs to embrace a new working style. To manage a team of Gen-Zs working from home, your leadership should not be micromanaging. Instead, leverage tools like Kanban Boards to keep track of everyone's work progress. Instead of focusing on scheduling and work hours, be task-driven. Give Gen-Zs the ability to plan their own time as long as the work gets done.
Recruiting Gen-Z into your workplace does not have to be difficult. What often makes it difficult is when many businesses cling to their “old ways” and choose to bend over backward for whatever their clients prefer. However, I believe that when you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of their clients, and your clients will take care of your business.
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