The inspiration for this piece came from a recent conversation with my good friend and fellow recipient of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling’s Partner of the Year recognition, Kim Napolitano, Executive Director of Global Industry Relations at Hilton. Kim champions Conscious Leadership at Hilton, work the company has documented in A Spotlight on Conscious Leadership and, more recently, in Workplace Wellbeing: 12 Intentional Behaviors That Build Healthier Workplaces, where she talks about what it’s meant to lead with empathy. I was excited to see how well the trauma-informed leadership design I use at RCG Workgroup lines up with her work to help organizations attract and retain Gen Z talent. You see, most organizations don’t have a Gen Z problem. Rather, they have a leadership design problem, and the data backs that up. Below, you’ll find that data along with the five directives RCG Workgroup uses to close the gap.
Do you realize your organization is inadvertently screening out 98 percent of the entry-level workforce it needs to survive, and that no single department can fix it alone? Research has found that only 2 percent of Gen Z shares the values your hiring managers are screening for. Refreshing a job posting won’t close that gap. Closing it for good requires you to direct hiring managers, people leaders, and training managers to change how they interview, onboard, and manage, and to hold each of them accountable for doing it.
I didn’t make up this number. It comes from NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch, whose research went viral after she broke it down on the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast. Her team at Becoming You Labs surveyed Gen Z’s core values, then cross-referenced them against a national survey of 2,100 hiring managers. Her research showed that Gen Z job candidates rank self-care, authentic self-expression, and helping people at the top of their list. By contrast, hiring managers are screening for achievement, learning, and an unbridled desire to work (NYU Stern). That gap helps justify the report’s title: Is Gen Z Unemployable?
As expected, Welch’s findings were disputed in the comments. Some of the sharpest pushback actually cut the other way. Several commenters pointed out that the hiring managers doing the complaining are largely millennials, projecting their own grind-culture values onto Gen Z rather than describing an objective standard. Other comments raised fair questions about sample size, but almost everyone missed the actual business question buried in the data. Is this a generation that can’t be hired, or a hiring and management system that hasn’t caught up? If your organization needs Gen Z talent to fill the pipeline (and most do), the answer determines whether you win or lose the next decade of recruiting. Here’s how to make sure you win it.
Start With Science, Not Stereotypes
The same week that Welch’s clip started circulating, a study published in Nature made a quieter and more useful point. Researchers examined the genomes of over one million people alongside their personality profiles and found more than 1,200 genetic variants tied to the Big Five personality traits of extraversion, openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. Putting an exclamation mark on the nature vs. nurture argument, the study found that genetics predict, at most, around 13 percent of personality, and that the rest comes from environment (TIME).
As study author Michel Nivard put it, there’s “this endless debate on whether our body and our experiences shape our personality, or whether personality shapes our experience.” The data leans hard toward experience. No single gene drives ambition, drive, or work ethic. The effects are diffuse, distributed, and shaped by what surrounds a person over time.
For you and every hiring manager, people leader, and trainer beneath you, that’s actionable information. If traits like drive and resilience are roughly seven-eighths environmental, then what a candidate walks in with isn’t fixed. It’s shaped by the workplace your organization builds around them. Gen Z didn’t arrive “unemployable.” It arrived shaped by a pandemic, economic instability, and watching the generations ahead of it burn out. Direct a different environment built across your organization and you’ll see different behavior from day one.
Know the Real Gap
At RCG Workgroup, we’ve adopted trauma-informed design, which has direct application to how your organization recruits and retains Gen Z talent. Before you direct your hiring managers to touch a single job posting or interview question, understand the real mismatch first. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, polling over 23,000 people across 44 countries, found 40 percent of Gen Z respondents feel stressed or anxious all or most of the time. Among Gen Zers who cite work as a stress driver, their primary concerns include working long hours without recognition (48 percent), a toxic workplace culture (44 percent), and decisions at work that don’t feel fair (44 percent) (Deloitte).
These statistics don’t show a generation allergic to achievement. Rather, they show that Gen Z is determined not to repeat what it sees as its parents’ mistakes of prioritizing work over family and personal time. It isn’t willing to put off the things that bring it joy until a scheduled vacation, or worse, retirement. It isn’t interested in deferring life. It wants to integrate work into a whole-life kind of satisfaction, and 86 percent of Gen Z employees say purpose is central to their well-being and job satisfaction, while 77 percent rank work-life balance as core to a successful career (Forbes).
Put those findings together and the offer your organization needs to make comes into focus. It’s emotional safety, fairness, and purpose, not just a title and a paycheck. Require every hiring manager to communicate that clearly, and your organization stands a good chance of attracting the 98 percent of Gen Z candidates it would otherwise miss while competing for the 2 percent who already share its values.
Know the Stakes for Your Business
Gen Z is projected to make up 27 percent of the national workforce, arriving at the exact moment Baby Boomers are leaving it in record numbers (Waste Today). This isn’t a temporary dip. The U.S. labor force is projected to shrink by nearly 6 million workers between 2025 and 2032 (Fortune), and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts monthly job openings at roughly 7.3 million against 7.0 million unemployed workers nationally, a market that’s already tight before you factor in the skills and location mismatches that leave many of those openings unfilled (BLS).
Write off Gen Z as unemployable in that market and you’re not making a values statement. You’re pulling your business out of the only growing talent pool left. Voluntary turnover already costs U.S. businesses roughly $1 trillion a year, and replacing a single employee can run 50 to 200 percent of their salary (Gallup). Keep recruiting and managing the way you did five years ago, and that bill only grows.
The talent pipeline problem isn’t coming. It’s already here, and the competitors who solve it first will out-hire you for the next decade.
The RCG Workgroup Game Plan
You don’t need to lower your organization’s standards to close this gap. You need to direct your hiring managers, people leaders, and training managers to redesign the path to the standard so more candidates can actually reach it and stay once they get there. We recently celebrated Labor Day, a fitting moment to recommit to the people building your workforce. Here are five directives to issue now for implementation in Q4.
- Direct hiring managers to publish decision rights and success metrics before day one. Require every new hire to receive a one-page document showing who decides what and how their first 90 days will be measured. Ambiguity reads as unfair, and unfair is the fastest way to lose a Gen Z hire before they’ve even started. It’s the same decision-rights document we build with clients at RCG Workgroup.
- Instruct people leaders to build recognition into the weekly rhythm, not the annual review. Set the expectation that every team adds a five-minute recognition moment to its weekly meeting. Waiting twelve months to say “well done” tells new hires the achievement culture they’re being recruited into doesn’t actually get modeled day to day.
- Require people leaders to give employees choice inside the structure. Set the goal once, then let managers decide the tools, schedule, and approach beneath it. This single shift, drawn straight from trauma-informed design, answers the “self-care versus hustle” tension without diluting accountability.
- Commission training managers to teach managers how to hold the standard and hold the safety at the same time. Fund a short workshop on giving direct, honest feedback without triggering shutdown or defensiveness. Accountability and psychological safety aren’t opposites. Pairing them is what turns a 2 percent value overlap into a workable relationship, and it’s the same workshop format we run inside RCG Workgroup client engagements.
- Charge people leaders with making purpose visible in the actual work, not just the offer letter. Require managers to connect one weekly task to its downstream impact on a customer, teammate, or mission. Purpose that only shows up in recruiting materials reads as marketing. Purpose that shows up in Tuesday’s stand-up reads as real.
Why This Pays Off Beyond Gen Z
Here’s the part most “Gen Z is unemployable” commentary misses entirely: according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, roughly 70 percent of adults report experiencing some form of trauma in their lifetime (Waste Today). That’s not a Gen Z statistic. That’s a workforce statistic. As workplace strategist Stephanie Lemek put it, “Compensation, job title, financial security are no longer enough to keep most of the workforce satisfied. We do have new tools and new language to address these challenges. Trauma-informed cultures can support better work experiences for everyone.”
Issue the five directives above and you won’t just close the gap with Gen Z candidates. You’ll cut burnout, reduce turnover costs, and raise performance across every generation already on your payroll. A 2 percent value overlap isn’t a diagnosis of a generation. It’s a design brief for your business. The organizations still treating it as proof Gen Z can’t be hired or led are going to keep losing the talent race to the ones that treat it as a signal to rebuild how they recruit, onboard, and manage.
That’s the work I do at RCG Workgroup, building leadership development and hiring practices on a trauma-informed foundation, tested in the environments where trust and performance both have to hold. If your organization is ready to close its own version of this gap, reach out and let’s build the plan together.
Bob Greene
Principal Consultant, RCG Workgroup
rcgworkgroup.com | LinkedIn | bob@rcgworkgroup.com | 703-216-9782
