If a new Wall Street Journal feature is to be believed (I have my doubts about how prevalent the issue truly is), then Gen Z is truly screwed, job-wise. Not just because AI is gobbling up entry-level work, but because the hiring process has become so bleak, so competitive and so demoralizing that some of their parents (who are mostly Gen Xers, our most lead-poisoned generation) are reportedly making their adult children look foolish by barging into the job hunt.
The WSJ reports that moms and dads are sitting just off-camera during Zoom interviews, calling hiring managers and applying for jobs on their kids’ behalf, and even popping into meetings to ask about benefits packages and such.
The Journal spoke with recruiters and HR professionals who say that this kind of thing used to be an occasional oddity, but now it’s increasingly becoming routine. Steven Clark, who runs an Alaska staffing firm, says he’s fielded enough calls from parents demanding to know why their child wasn’t hired, or aesthetically pleading with him after they were fired.
He tells the story of how he had to fire a 24-year-old construction worker because he had “showed up late or not at all four times in his first week,” only to have to do the entire conversation again with the guy’s mom.
Gen Z’s Brutal Job Market Has Parents Getting Way Too Involved
Another hiring manager, Lynne Alba, says parents have approached her at job fairs carrying their adult children’s résumés. Amber Little says parents have called to dispute performance reviews, ask about health insurance and even call in sick for their grown kids. Jasmine Escalera, a career coach at Zety, calls it “co-piloting,” and a Zety survey found one in five Gen Z respondents had a parent attend a job interview.
Again, I do wonder how prevalent all this actually is, Zety survey or not, though there is a logic to it. The pandemic hit right as Gen Z was in the midst of its adolescence, disrupting their early work experience and social skills. They reentered the workforce, and the world, to find that the corporate world (run mostly by their Gen X parents and their Boomer grandparents) seemed to be hastily scrambling to replace as many human workers with AI as it possibly could.
Paired with an economy that is seemingly designed to discourage, and I get why young people are struggling and why their parents (hopefully sympathetically) are trying to hold their hand through the process, even if it has the unintended consequence of making them look like big babies no one in their right mind would hire.
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