Last month, the front door of the Dollar Tree store in Bremen, IN featured a Help Wanted sign blasting Gen Z employees (teens and young twenty-somethings) and offering job applications only to Baby Boomers (adults born 1946-1964).
The exasperated manager of this particular retailer immediately found herself in hot water because of the obvious age discrimination on her hand-made sign. However, it’s important to realize that even though this job posting only appeared on this store’s front door, she’s not the only business owner or manager who feels they are at a breaking point with this new emerging workforce.
As a former high school business teacher turned career-day motivational speaker for hundreds of high schools all over the US and Canada, I can assure you that today’s teens are NOT merely clones of you back when you were their age. They do NOT think, act, and behave like you did when you got your first job.
That means that if you try to recruit them — and hire them — and onboard them — and train them — and manage them — and if you try to motivate them the way you were recruited, hired, trained, etc. like you were recruited, hired, trained, etc, back in the day, you’re going to find your breaking point in a hurry.
Rest assured, there is a ton of promise and potential in this enigmatic Gen Z workforce. They want to be successful in their early jobs and they have a skill set that will astound you. And they are able to adapt to the rapid changes that are happening in your business every day much quicker than you and your seasoned workers are able to adapt. That being said, they are going to arrive with a different set of attitudes, values, and beliefs about this thing you call ‘work’.
To unleash their talents and get them operating at full capacity you’re going to have to be able to plug into their way of seeing things before they are going to plug into your way of doing things.
I’ll be posting more on how to find, develop, and retain teens and young adults this week and next.
For now, check out the way I describe the differences between their world and ours in this short 4m video.
