A latest survey finds that hiring managers often don’t look favorably at recent college graduates, suggesting that Gen Zers face an uphill battle in terms of landing their first job after graduation.
Roughly 1 in 4 hiring managers say that recent grads aren’t prepared for the workforce, in response to a recent survey from the education publisher Intelligent. A good 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’re getting criticized within the workplace.
The purported issues with recent grads have led 12% of firms with entry-level openings to avoid younger staff and prioritize older candidates, Intelligent said.
“As an alternative of avoiding recent college grads entirely based on biases and stereotypes, hiring managers have to adopt more proactive and nuanced approaches to identifying promising candidates,” Huy Nguyen, Intelligent’s chief education and profession advisor, said in a press release.
The bias may very well be considered one of the explanation why recent graduates and younger staff have disproportionately high unemployment rates. In response to the most up-to-date data from the Recent York Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate for recent grads is 5.3% in comparison with 2.5% for all college grads and 4% for all staff.
Young staff on the whole, aged 22 to 27, have an unemployment rate of 6.7%.
Isn’t that age discrimination?
Most often, firms can legally avoid hiring recent grads in the event that they decide to. When that phrase is a code for younger staff, that’s when it gets complicated.
Federally, there are legal protections for age-based discrimination for staff 40 and older, in response to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). But there aren’t any explicit federal rules keeping them from discriminating against staff younger than that on the premise of their age.
Nonetheless, no less than a dozen states — including Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Recent York and others — have prolonged employment protections to younger staff, in essence banning age discrimination across the board within the workplace. But in most places within the U.S., staff under 40 won’t enjoy those self same rights.
Nguyen recommends recent grads and younger staff should prepare for that reality.
“Pay attention to the negative perceptions and biases,” he said, and which means performing some extra legwork before the interview, in some cases, to know learn how to stand out out of your peers and win over hiring managers.
In Intelligent’s survey, managers especially railed against specific quirks in the course of the interview stage, reminiscent of 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 essentially the most and taking an intentional approach to interviewing,” Nguyen said, “candidates can increase their possibilities of making a superb impression and standing out.”
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