Fortune reports this week on a survey that finds 93 percent of Gen Z workers have been no-shows at scheduled interviews, and 87 percent have skipped the first day of work, never to return.
I sort of did that once, as a very young man, trying to scrape together a living in Chicago before landing my first writing job: After four nights of working as a “night waterman”—hand-irrigating a golf course from noon to 8:00 a.m.—on the fifth night, I simply switched off the alarm. I remember writhing in bed the next morning as my boss asked my answering machine where I was and whether I would return and if not, how I might receive my first and last paycheck. I did not believe I deserved a paycheck after such a cowardly and irresponsible spitting of the bit.
Gen Zers ghost would-be employers, they said in a survey, because it makes them “feel in charge of their careers.”
I have written about ghosting. In fact, I have called it “a crime against humanity,” because every time you ghost someone—whether a date or a would-be employer—you make them “more generally cynical and lonely and despairing in the reliability and goodness of other people, you nihilistic, cowardly, no-account creep.”
And yet: There is some retributive justice in young people ghosting employers, when employers have long been doing the same to job-seekers—many of them older workers who are astonished and hurt by this cold treatment. I hear from middle-aged communication people all the time who are two, three, four, five interviews in with an employer, only to hear nothing for weeks or months and to find out that the employer hired somebody else—sometimes, though a cheery LinkedIn announcement by the happy peer who got the job!
So while it’s surely another sorry sign of our civil unraveling that people feel no compunction about letting other people down, there’ll be no crying in particular for employers, who are getting ghosted by the youngsters they’re trying to replace the oldsters with.
How does it feel?
(P.S. Speaking of colorful bit-spitting, Kurt Vonnegut was an early hire at the fledgling Sports Illustrated magazine in 1954. Young Vonnegut spent his first morning there, agonizing over a caption for a picture of a race horse that had shied at the opening gun and escaped the confines of Aqueduct race track. Vonnegut left for lunch and never came back. His supervisor found a page in his typewriter with the caption, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence.”)
(P.P.S. My father-in-law ran a construction management firm where a young engineer was discovered by the IT people of looking at porn, at work. The lad was brought into the corner office and told the practice violated corporate policy. A few weeks later, he was caught again. This time, he was told another violation would result in his dismissal. That was on a Friday. That Monday, the brass arrived at work and discovered the young man had cleaned out his desk, leaving only a Post-It on his computer screen that said, “If I can’t look at porn, I don’t want to work here.”)
David, long time…great post, it was both humorous and helpful. I do feel some sympathy for Gen Z-ers and, more importantly, as a “geriatric millennial” (whoever comes up with these is not getting paid enough) I feel real empathy for anyone who walks into work every day with a figurative “kick me” sign on their back until their hair starts graying…or worse.
I was also recently discussing with a family friend how their (young 20 something) nanny won’t respond to her texts after 6pm, even when she inquiries the last time their infant had a bowel movement. The gall. I pointed out, “you know, some people take the idea of a 9-5 job pretty seriously and are actually able to maintain that boundary.” She then conceded that she ALWAYS gets a reply text in the morning. Presumably by then, the issue in question has been resolved but still.