Why Gen Z is getting fired after being hired | The Excerpt

On the Wednesday, May 6, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: Gen Z is getting hired—and then fired. Some employers say young workers aren’t meeting expectations. But NYU professor Suzy Welch argues the issue runs deeper than skills or professionalism. In this episode, she explains why Gen Z and employers may be fundamentally misaligned—and how AI and a changing job market are making that gap even harder to bridge.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

A recent headline is raising questions about the youngest workers in the labor force, Gen Z. Some employers say they're hiring Gen Z employees only to let them go within months, citing gaps in communication, professionalism, and workplace readiness. But this kind of criticism isn't exactly new. Previous generations faced similar labels when they first entered the workforce, even as the nature of work itself was shifting. So what's really going on here? Is this a Gen Z problem or a workplace problem?

Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, May 6th, 2026. Here to dig into Gen Z and how they can be successful in the labor force in the age of AI is Suzy Welch, professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.

So good to speak with you, Suzy.

Suzy Welch:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

The unemployment rate for recent college grads per the latest data released by the Federal Reserve of New York at the end of 2025 is 5.7%. That's roughly a point and a half higher than it is for other age cohorts. Why do you think that is?

Suzy Welch:

Well, it's a confluence of events. I was with a student who came to my office the other day. She's got a degree in computer science, she's very good at math and she cannot find a job. And she was in such a state of despair. I just want to put a human face to these numbers. And she was a very talented young woman. And I said to her, "I think you're going to have to open your aperture about the jobs that you're looking at." She was looking for what the conveyor belt would typically dump her at. There's a conveyor belt when you've got a certain degree and the conveyor belts went to certain jobs and there's softness in those jobs as employers are reluctant to hire, thinking that AI might be able to do these entry level jobs so they're moving more slowly. And then they have been a bit burned by their Gen Z hires, as we know. And so I think that there's structural reasons and there's very modern reasons about what's going on.

Dana Taylor:

I want to turn now to Gen Z's ability to keep jobs once they've been hired. A recent survey by intelligent.com that made the headline says that six in 10 employers say they're letting Gen Z hires go within months. What does that stat actually tell us and what's missing from it?

Suzy Welch:

I think that stat tells us the truth, what's going on. And I have an interesting perspective on it perhaps, which is that I have interesting research that might shed some light on it. So I teach two classes at NYU. One is Management, the classic management class that you would have at any business school. And then I also teach a class called Becoming You, which is a class that helps students figure out what they should do with their life, which my timing on teaching that class was quite prescient coming out of the pandemic. For this class, the premise is that your purpose in life lies to the intersection of your values, your aptitudes and your interests. So with that as I said, I'll say that I end up creating a tool called The Values Bridge, which discerns and rank orders individual's values from 1 to 16, it's a fully scientifically validated test and in the past year about 200,000 people have taken it.

And so we are able to cut this very large data set by generation and I cut the data to find out what Gen Z's values were. And once I had that list, I did a second survey interviewing hiring managers, 25,000 hiring managers, over the ages 40 who managed more than five people. And we asked them, what are the values that you're looking for in the Gen Z people that you're hiring? And I got that list. And then I cross-referenced that data. And what it showed is that only 2% of Gen Z has the values that hiring managers want and are looking for. So what ends up happening in my estimation is a staggering number, 2%. Staggering. And I think when people say, oh, this has happened in previous generations, the young folks come along and the old folks say, "That's not the way I was." Yeah, that's true, but not at this magnitude. At 98% do not have the values that hiring managers are looking for, only 2% do. That's crazy magnitude.

And so what's happening is they're getting them in, they're seeing if they can change them. When they don't change them, they say, "I've had enough of this" and how they go. And I think that's what we're seeing. So just to be more specific, Gen Z's top three values, number one is what we call in the survey eudaimonia that's self-care. That's the Greek work for flourishing. When I use the word self-care, usually people's heads explode. So I just use this more neutral name, eudaimonia. But it does meet self-care, personal flourishing, recreation, and leisure. Their second value is voice, which is authentic self-expression. They want to be themselves at all time, and they want to be very authentic in the workplace. And their number three value is helping others, which is a beautiful and noble value.

For hiring managers, the number one value that they're looking for is achievement, the desire to win. The number two value that they're looking for is work centrism, the desire to work. And the number three value that they're looking for is scope, which is the desire for learning and activity and adventure, which would generally, I would translate in the workplace as travel. So that's a gigantic mismatch in values, and that's what we're seeing play out. And because the market is favoring the buyer, the employer right now, not the seller, the employee, the buyer is saying, "I'm not liking this. I'm returning it to the store and I'm going to go look for a model that I like better."

Dana Taylor:

So when we look at employers, what they're saying Gen Z workers aren't doing, aren't meeting expectations, what are they specifically pointing to? What's the gap that Gen Z needs to, or maybe this is on employers as well, but what's the gap, the common gap that you're hearing about?

Suzy Welch:

So the gap is, just look at the numbers again, the gap is that employers want workers to care about winning and working, and Gen Z employees care about self-care and individuality. So that's the gap. And it shows up every day in kind of minor ways is like the bosses are at the office early and they stay late and they care if they win or lose a client and they are worried about competition and how money is spent. And Gen Z's basically saying, "I don't like those rules. Those were your values and they didn't work out so well for your generation. I'm not going to buy them. My parents had those values and they got unemployed at age 54."

I mean, one thing I will say is that my area of research involves values expression, which is how these values play out in the real world. And I am not a specialist at all in values formation. So I can only report these statistics. I can't tell you how Gen Z came to their values. But I teach Gen Z day in and day out and so I ask them, "Hey, why is it that achievement ... " Okay. The achievement is the value and work centricism is another value that employers want. For Gen Z, achievement is number 12 as a value, and work centrism is number 13. So they do not value these things that the oldsters like myself and most hiring managers want.

And look, I want to say I love Gen Z. I teach them. I know them personally. There's wonderful, wonderful things about them. I'm not part of the hate Gen Z dynamic out there, but there definitely is a gap between the ways they want to act at work and the ways their managers want them to act.

Dana Taylor:

Gen Z is the first generation to enter the workforce after the pandemic, which was of course a major disruption in their education as well as to how we work. How much has that shaped things like communication, confidence, or expectations?

Suzy Welch:

I don't know how much the pandemic had to do with it, to tell you the truth. I really don't. I mean, the pandemic was a gigantic disruption, but so was the bombing of London during World War II and people got back to it. So I do think that, again, my fair area of specialty is not values formation, but I do think that one thing that happened during the pandemic was people got this in the zeitgeist, why would I postpone joy? Why would I postpone self-care? The world could just blow up at any moment. And they also got accustomed living their lives in front of their computer and not being in the workplace. And so then when work then said, "Well, hey, we'd like you to postpone joy and pleasure and leisure, and we'd like you to come into the office." They were like, "But I like the other way, and I don't want to conform to these old rules."

Dana Taylor:

We're hearing a lot about what Gen Z needs to do to improve. What are employers getting wrong right now when it comes to hiring and supporting young workers?

Suzy Welch:

Let me just back up for one quick second to your question, which is, I want to say I don't recommend anybody try to change their values. So I don't think that Gen Z is, quote-unquote, getting it wrong. I would never tell somebody, "Go change your values, go get the value of achievement." Your values are your values. And so I think that what they need to do isn't just their expectations about where they're going to work. So if they keep their values, which they should, those are their values, nobody should change their values, they have to understand there's consequences and they're not going to have the kinds of jobs that perhaps their college degrees prepared them for.

Now, as for what employers should do, it depends if employers want to employ the 2% or the 98%. So the very good firms want to employ the 2%. And as CEOs, I heard from a lot of CEOs after my article ran in The Wall Street Journal about this data and they all said, "Well, it's a cage match, isn't it, for the 2%?" And so companies are going to fight tooth and nail to get that 2%. And the other companies, I don't know if they're going to conform. It's very hard to compete when you've got employees who don't care about competition, and it's very hard to get work done when you have employees who don't want to work. And so maybe they'll conform, but I think as long as it's a buyer's market, which it is with unemployment numbers the way they are, I don't know.

Dana Taylor:

So you mentioned AI, and I want to dig into that a little more deeply and look at how it's playing into this equation. There is a lot of reporting that for Gen Z, including recent graduates, entry level jobs have been replaced by AI. And so there's a fundamental lack of opportunity to learn the soft skills that a white collar employee needs. Do you think that's true?

Suzy Welch:

Well, AI is definitely afoot in terms of being able to do everything that entry level or many things that entry level employees did because I mean, I have a person on my own team who created an agent that did her job and a data scientist, literally created an agent who now does her entire job. Luckily we had other work for her. But I have a company that I run myself, and so that's what I'm referring to, not as a professor. And so I do think this is a gigantic structural problem that we're going to face into. And it's true that when you're in these entry level jobs you do learn some soft skills, you learn collaboration, you learn communication, but it's also the working remotely.

I ask my students every semester who wants to work in the office five days a week, I get two people. And then when I get down to four days a week, that's like five people. And then finally when I'm sort of like, who wants to be remote? It's 80% of the people. And if you're not talking to people and going out to lunch and somebody comes into the office and they don't look the same, they've got kind of a cast of their face. You don't see that and you don't go into their office and say, "Hey, is everything okay? I noticed you're not yourself." "Yeah. Hey, I just found out that my dog's sick." You just don't develop all of these skills that you need to advance. And yet that's a very hard case to make to Gen Z. When I say to Gen Z, "You've got to be there. You've got to be in the office." They just say, "Not anymore. There's really no reason for it. You dinosaur, you." And that's their view.

Dana Taylor:

For companies that are successfully hiring and retaining Gen Z employees, what are they doing differently?

Suzy Welch:

They're hiring the 2%. That's what they're doing. Those companies, that's JP Morgan, that's Goldman Sachs, that's Bain. I mean, they're looking for the 2% and they're hiring them because then they don't have the values disconnect. They just don't. And so they are right off to the races. I think that's what's happening. So you see the companies that are doing it, it's all in the hiring. They know exactly what they're looking for. That test that I mentioned, The Values Bridge, I can't tell you how many of these good companies are using it as part of the hiring process. They are looking and ascertaining. I mean, I can't decide how people have used the test, anybody can take it. But I mean, more and more, we are seeing these large banks and these large companies using it during the agency process. So they're hiring very carefully for values.

Dana Taylor:

Suzy, for Gen Zers who are listening to this conversation right now, what's your biggest piece of advice to be successful in today's job market?

Suzy Welch:

Well, do you mean to get hired or to be successful? I mean-

Dana Taylor:

Successful.

Suzy Welch:

Well, I mean, the thing is that Gen Z has a different definition of success than we do. So they don't have a high value on achievement or work centrism. So their definition of success is closer to that work-life balance and a life where they have a lot of flexibility. And so I think it's just choosing the company and the career that allows you to have that. There's going to be a trade-off in wealth accumulation, but many of them are willing to make it. And so I think understanding your own definition of success, which is not your parents' definition of success, and in some cases, not the society or culture's traditional definition of success is going to be important. And to understand there's trade-offs.

I think right now, Gen Z is very young and when we were young, we didn't understand trade-offs either. Very commonly when students take The Values Bridge test, they find out that their number one value is self-care and their number two value is affluent wealth. And they say to me, "Professor Welch, is this a problem?" And I say, "It's going to be, but you'll have to work that out and figure that out on your own." And they'll have to make some decisions about how they want to live just like we did.

Dana Taylor:

Suzy, thank you so much for joining me having this conversation.

Suzy Welch:

My pleasure.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.