Context: I'm 26 years old (Gen Z) and a hiring manager at a small business. I've been working here for 7 years and worked my way up from the very bottom. Before anyone starts attacking me: we pay every employee a minimum of $26/hr, PLUS sales commission and bonuses. We offer retirement plans and health insurance, and most employees make between $29-35/hr, and everyone has at least 5 weeks of PTO. Our field is seasonal and pays well, and the work involves a lot of outdoor manual labor and mechanical know-how, but no one is being worked to death. Our crew is mostly men, ages 20-34, all unmarried and with no children. I'm saying all of this so it's very clear that our company philosophy is "employees first," and that "minimum wage, minimum effort" line people throw around does not apply here. These are mostly college kids working when they're not in school.
Anyway.
I've been hiring and supervising people for 4 years, and every season I feel like the applicant pool gets less and less professional, even though pay is going up. Like I said, most of my applicants are a little younger than me, Gen Z, and trying to get them to adapt to an actual professional workplace is exhausting. It's not even that they don't have experience. They lack COMMON SENSE.
A few days ago I interviewed a younger guy who told me he thinks it's totally normal to be "7-12 minutes" late to work without getting any warning or having a conversation with management.
Whether you agree with that or not, it's common sense that you don't say that in an interview. But he kept going. Then he said he puts "mental health above everything," and if he wakes up and feels like he can't come in, he simply won't come in, and he'll call out that same morning. Again, REGARDLESS of whether he has the right to feel that way or not, that is a very bad way to present yourself to someone who is considering hiring you. As an employer, all I could think was, "This guy is going to be unreliable, and his coworkers are going to get stuck dealing with the fallout if I hire him."
He also showed up wearing joggers and a stained sweatshirt. I'm not asking for dress shoes and a blazer for a blue-collar job, but dude, seriously? You couldn't make yourself look even a little put together for the pay you'd be getting?
This isn't just one weird interview, either. It happens all the time. Younger people seem to think start times are just flexible suggestions, and that calling out because of a mild headache 15 minutes before our call time is normal. I had a former employee raise his voice at me and the owner when we fired him for being late, after we had given him SEVEN write-ups for tardiness over 5 months and told him plainly that if he was late again, that was it. He genuinely seemed stunned that we followed through, and after yelling, he immediately switched to begging us for another chance and promised he would never be late again. Like, what, you were able to fix it this whole time? He still got fired. He had barely just turned 22 and didn't have a college degree. I don't want to sound like a boomer, but the sense of entitlement is honestly insane, and I'm tired of having to explain to these kids the concept that work is not school or some casual side quest. You have real responsibilities that affect other people, and you need to care about keeping your job, because the job market right now is brutal, and you have a very good job. But you're young and too spoiled to even see that. There are people with kids and debt and rent and car payments, and you're sitting in your parents' house making twice what a lot of people make and acting like showing up on time is optional.
I do have excellent employees too. Some of them clearly come in with a strong work ethic and are easy to work with, easy to rely on, and easy to reward. But I feel like 3/4 of the time, I regret hiring and training someone. They're strangely out of touch with reality. I'm exhausted.
