With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior human resources executive, Matthew Breitfelder (MBA 2002) has seen a lot of change in the corporate talent space. But what’s happening now looks like a tectonic generational shift.

From his perch as global head of human capital at Apollo Global Management, Breitfelder sees a corporate landscape in which the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who run things are avidly pursuing the Gen Zers who are just beginning their careers. But those who were born between 1997 and 2012 “want to be led very differently than the leaders running those companies were led. The up-and-coming generation is really focused on flexibility. They’re really focused on diversity. They’re really focused on purpose,” Breitfelder says. “And most of the people leading these companies never had any flexibility in that part of their career. They worked in less diverse organizations. And purpose was considered part of your personal life, not part of your professional life.”

The preferences and predilections of Gen Z might not matter quite so much if the labor market weren’t so tight and if Gen Zers weren’t so numerous—or so prone to taking flight. For much of the past year, unemployment has been hovering at historic lows; in April, it sank to 3.4 percent, a figure not seen since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. US Chamber of Commerce analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the first part of 2023 indicates that there are approximately 1.7 unfilled positions for every job seeker, resulting in significant labor shortages in sectors ranging from business services to manufacturing.

Gen Zers, meanwhile, will comprise approximately one-third of the workforce by 2025. And they are inveterate job hoppers.

A December 2022 survey by LinkedIn and Censuswide showed that 72 percent of Gen Zers were considering leaving their jobs in 2023, while a January 2023 study by management consultancy Oliver Wyman found that 70 percent of those who described themselves as “loyal” to their employers were nonetheless looking for new jobs—and were even prepared to quit without a backup plan.

Attracting—and hanging on to—workers age 26 and under requires rethinking many aspects of talent acquisition and management. Some solutions are fairly straightforward: Among their many distinguishing characteristics, for instance, Gen Zers are digital natives who have never known a world without the internet and can’t imagine one without social media. So savvy employers are turning to platforms like TikTok and Instagram to reach potential hires. Other aspects are more subtle and involve addressing the divergent expectations among this group and the older cohorts that lead them: expectations about the relationship between employee and employer, about benefits and workplace organization, and even about the nature of work itself.

Here, Breitfelder and his peers Gloria T. Chen (MBA 1994), chief people officer at Adobe, and Josh Bronstein (MBA 2010), head of global talent at Bank of America, share their insights into what it takes to recruit and retain members of Generation Z—and how this youngest cohort of workers is changing the way business gets done.

Bronstein emphasizes that it would be a mistake to assume that everyone under the age of 26 thinks and behaves in the same way.

Survey after survey, for example, has found that a hefty majority of Gen Zers prefer hybrid or remote work. Yet Bronstein, who is responsible for approximately 200,000 colleagues, and Chen, who is responsible for nearly 30,000, find that those who had the least personal contact as a result of pandemic lockdowns now want it the most.

“Some of the newest teammates who spent years on college campuses virtually are hungriest for that in-person connection when they arrive,” Bronstein says.

Rather than trafficking in stereotypes, Breitfelder, Bronstein, and Chen all conduct detailed internal surveys to better understand what their employees are actually looking for and how they can deliver it in a way that is consistent with their companies’ core missions and strategies.

Bronstein, for example, gathers data on things like employee retention, engagement, and satisfaction, and filters it not only by age but by everything from career stage and line of business to ethnicity and sexual orientation. Breitfelder, meanwhile, solicits information on every aspect of the employee experience to figure out what his people are already happy with and what more needs to be done to make Apollo a better and more attractive place to work.

“You’ve got to co-create your culture,” he says. “And how do you do that? You ask for feedback. So I position myself as the walking suggestion box in my company.”

One of the things that Breitfelder and his peers have noticed among Gen Zers is a strong emphasis on doing purposeful work that aligns with their values. (That’s consistent with external survey results that demonstrate a lack of such alignment is one of the key reasons cited for wanting to leave a current position.)

For example, when Adobe began developing a new family of generative AI models called Firefly that could, among other things, create and modify visual content based on text input—type “a futuristic scarlet tanager bird,” for example, and Firefly will produce an image of one from scratch—the company invited all of its employees, including its newest ones, to participate in a massive internal beta test. Comments came back not only about bugs but also about the need to develop the technology with ethical guidelines in mind, such as preventing it from generating biased or inappropriate content.

“The Gen Z employee is looking to understand the things we do not just from a business perspective, but [in terms of] the purpose of our organization: Are we focused on promoting technology that will be used for the good of society?” Chen says. And they are not willing to wait to have a say in that process: “They want to do meaningful work and see impact sooner. They don’t want to just be a cog in the machine.”

That desire for impact can be satisfied in many different ways and in service of many different priorities. Bronstein, for instance, says that Bank of America’s commitment to sustainable finance, such as issuing green bonds that support projects with positive environmental impacts, attracts Gen Zers who are looking for jobs in banking—a sector that is not particularly well-known for being socially progressive.

“When we engage with potential campus hires, the interest in sustainability and sustainable finance is tremendous,” he says.

Breitfelder has seen a similar response to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. At Apollo, these include AltFinance, a joint venture with rival investment management firms Ares and Oak Tree that seeks to attract, train, and provide career opportunities for graduates of historically Black colleges and universities; and the Apollo Opportunity Foundation, which will invest $100 million over the next 10 years in nonprofit organizations that expand opportunities for underrepresented groups.

Any Apollo employee can nominate a nonprofit for foundation funding and form a team to help the organization achieve its social mission; for example, the firm recently partnered with Girls Who Invest, which prepares young women to succeed as portfolio managers. And while the foundation is clearly aligned with the goals of increasing diversity and advancing social justice, it also serves Apollo’s strategic goal of diversifying its own talent pool—a combination that is extremely popular with many workers under the age of 26.

“They love this because that’s the kind of company they want to work for: We have a very successful business, but we also have lots of opportunities for them to have a positive impact on the world,” Breitfelder says.

Inclusion, too, is a major concern for Gen Zers who are unusually keen on bringing their personal backgrounds and perspectives to work with them. At Bank of America, this is accomplished in part through “Courageous Conversations”: group discussions aimed at encouraging employees to talk about topics that matter to them. Those dialogues can take the form of intimate conversations within teams and networks as well as enterprise-level exchanges with the bank’s community partners, and they have dealt with subjects ranging from race and gender to local and national events.

Similarly, Adobe runs an internal storytelling program called Adobe For All that lets employees around the globe share their personal experiences with each other in print, on video, and even live onstage in what Chen describes as TED Talk–like segments. The results can be startlingly candid. People have told their coming-out stories, recounted tales of racism and childhood trauma, described how they overcame drug addiction, and talked about how they rebuilt their lives after a period of incarceration. And Chen has found that younger employees aren’t the only ones who appreciate feeling welcomed and supported in their place of work: “I know it’s very important for Gen Z,” she says. “But it’s important for everyone to listen, learn, and grow together.”

Chen and her colleagues have also seen significant demand for mental health benefits among their youngest employees—a reflection of this generation’s interest in health and wellness in general, and mental health in particular.

“We know this is of the utmost importance to Gen Z,” Bronstein says. “We hear it in our survey data, we hear it from our campus hires, and we hear it from our relationships with university and college campuses.”

There is good reason for that. Several studies indicate that Generation Z suffers higher rates of depression and anxiety than older cohorts. A 2022 Gallup survey found that younger employees report “more overall stress and work-related burnout than older groups”—factors that can hurt performance and contribute to job hopping. A 2022 survey by Deloitte found that stress and burnout levels among both Gen Zers and millennials presented “a significant retention issue for employers.”

Employers are responding. Bank of America has expanded its mental health benefits to include free access to virtual behavioral health professionals; 24/7 confidential counseling sessions for workers and their immediate families; and a partnership with Thrive Global, an online well-being platform founded by Arianna Huffington to combat burnout.

Mental health services are not the only things that matter to young workers, however. The data show that growth and development opportunities are also high on their list of priorities, albeit with a generational twist.

Bronstein, for example, describes this generation as less ladder-oriented than older groups; as in, “do exactly what the person above you did and you will move to the next rung on the ladder.”

“It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t want to advance,” he explains. “But sometimes they want to do it in their own way and on their own terms.”

That disinclination toward purely linear career paths jibes well with Bank of America’s approach to training and development, which emphasizes foundational skills that can be applied to many roles. The company offers a “credit curriculum,” for instance, that teaches core credit skills that can lead to careers in areas ranging from investment banking to credit underwriting and risk management. (It also offers prepaid tuition vouchers that employees can use to cover the cost of outside training, along with tuition reimbursement to help allay educational expenses previously accrued, which is a major draw for recent grads who are already saddled with college debt.)

But if this cohort is hungry for ongoing learning—that same 2022 survey by Deloitte found that learning and development opportunities ranked even higher than salary among the reasons Gen Zers chose to work for their current employers—they don’t necessarily want to sit still for extended periods to get it.

“We’re hearing from our Gen Z employees that they don’t want to attend three days of training,” Chen notes. Instead, younger employees prefer to absorb information in bite-sized chunks, getting what they need when they need it.

They also expect critical feedback to be administered with plenty of positive affirmation, something that further distinguishes them from their older colleagues.

“Most Gen X people like me grew up with very little of that from our bosses, because it was assumed feedback should focus on problems and not on reinforcement,” Breitfelder explains. Thanks to changes in education and parenting, however, Gen Zers are accustomed to receiving more validation. Consequently, Breitfelder says, “they need positive feedback as fuel.”

That need for validation feeds the stereotype of Gen Zers as fragile, entitled narcissists who lack grit and determination. But Breitfelder argues that this preference for positive feedback is supported by the latest research on strengths-based coaching, which suggests that affirming people’s strengths before offering suggestions for improvement achieves better performance results than simply focusing on weaknesses.

“That impulse coming from Gen Z is really backed up by the science,” Breitfelder says.

There are signs that Generation Z may be having an impact on how work gets done, as well.

At Adobe, for example, teams get to decide how they work. Chen has seen an increasing tendency toward multifunctional squads of people from various disciplines (engineering and design, marketing and sales) who work together to rapidly iterate solutions to whatever problem faces them. Chen attributes this at least in part to Gen Zers having gone through an educational system that values teamwork and project-based learning. And she points out that these agile teams are well-suited to today’s competitive business environment. “The digital-first world requires that kind of speed,” she says.

There are limits, however, to the influence that Gen Z can exert. Surveys show that up to 75 percent of these employees prefer remote or hybrid work. That doesn’t mean most businesses will suddenly allow most of their employees to work from home whenever they like.

Bronstein, for instance, acknowledges that the pandemic expanded “the art of the possible” with respect to remote work. But he adds that Bank of America can move only so far from the in-person experience. “We have a relationship culture and an apprenticeship culture,” he says. “You don’t get that from a Zoom meeting in your basement.”

Similarly, while Apollo is experimenting with a hybrid model, Breitfelder says that the firm remains committed to a “majority in-office culture.” And he thinks that will remain the rule rather than the exception.

“Most companies are not going to go fully remote even if Gen Z prefers it, because the business model wouldn’t work,” he says.

For Breitfelder, however, managing the tension between what employees want and what companies need to do, in order to execute their strategy, is simply part of a talent leader’s job description. And if Gen Z is broadening the palette of options from which HR executives can choose, so much the better.

“The Gen Z input is exciting because it’s expanding the toolbox that you have available to attract and retain the best people,” says Breitfelder. “Every company just has to decide which tools are a good fit for their culture.”

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