A new survey finds that hiring managers often don’t look favorably at recent college graduates, suggesting that Gen Zers face an uphill battle when it comes to landing their first job after graduation.
Roughly 1 in 4 hiring managers say that recent grads aren’t prepared for the workforce, according to a recent survey from the education publisher Intelligent. An even larger share of hiring managers said that recent grads lack work ethic (33%), are entitled (29%) and are too easily offended (27%). Some 17% said recent grads are lazy.
Not even a decade ago, these complaints were lodged almost verbatim at millennials. Now it’s Gen Zers, commonly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, who are getting criticized in the workplace.
The purported issues with recent grads have led 12% of companies with entry-level openings to avoid younger workers and prioritize older candidates, Intelligent said.
“Instead of avoiding recent college grads entirely based on biases and stereotypes, hiring managers need to adopt more proactive and nuanced approaches to identifying promising candidates,” Huy Nguyen, Intelligent’s chief education and career advisor, said in a statement.
The bias could be one of the reasons why recent graduates and younger workers have disproportionately high unemployment rates. According to the most recent data from the New York Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate for recent grads is 5.3% compared to 2.5% for all college grads and 4% for all workers.
Young workers in general, aged 22 to 27, have an unemployment rate of 6.7%.
Isn’t that age discrimination?
In most cases, companies can legally avoid hiring recent grads if they choose to. When that phrase is a code for younger workers, that’s when it gets complicated.
Federally, there are legal protections for age-based discrimination for workers 40 and older, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). But there are no explicit federal rules keeping them from discriminating against workers younger than that on the basis of their age.
However, at least a dozen states — including Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, New York and others — have extended employment protections to younger workers, in essence banning age discrimination across the board in the workplace. But in most places in the U.S., workers under 40 won’t enjoy those same rights.
Nguyen recommends recent grads and younger workers should prepare for that reality.
“Be aware of the negative perceptions and biases,” he said, and that means doing some extra legwork before the interview, in some cases, to know how to stand out from your peers and win over hiring managers.
In Intelligent’s survey, managers especially railed against specific quirks during the interview stage, such as not making eye contact, dressing inappropriately, requesting “unreasonable compensation” and — the mother of all interview faux pas — bringing a parent.
“By understanding what frustrates managers the most and taking an intentional approach to interviewing,” Nguyen said, “candidates can increase their chances of making a good impression and standing out.”
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