Why Companies Are Firing Gen Z (and What a Comedian Sees)

Every few weeks there's a new headline about bosses giving up on young hires, and underneath all of them sits one question: why are companies firing Gen Z? Talent isn't the issue. What happens in the room is. Eye contact, small talk, saying "got it" out loud when the boss finishes a sentence.

Fortune called it a warning to Fortune 500 CEOs this spring, pointing to a 2024 Intelligent.com survey in which six in 10 companies said they'd avoided hiring a Gen Z candidate over professionalism concerns. A WBTV report in March cited the same survey: six in 10 employers were hesitant to hire Gen Z again after firing them a few months into the job.

I've been doing stand-up for over 20 years, and after more than 5,000 shows I can tell you what HR keeps missing about eye contact. It's a skill, skills come from reps, and a whole generation got its reps canceled.

What are employers actually complaining about?

Read past the outrage and the list is short. Managers say the work gets done; what bugs them is that new hires don't signal they're doing it. The blank look when you give an instruction, now famous as the "Gen Z stare." Phone calls avoided. Meetings where nobody under 26 says a word.

Fortune's piece describes the stare as "a deadpan, unresponsive gaze that young workers deliver in place of verbal acknowledgment." If you've managed a 23-year-old in the last two years, you just nodded. (Out loud, I hope.)

The cost is real. Fortune cites Gallup research showing Gen Z had the steepest engagement drop of any generation in 2024, five points in a single year, and Randstad data putting Gen Z's average early-career tenure at 1.1 years, against 1.8 for millennials. Every one of those short stints turns into a hiring bill.

Is it a Gen Z problem or a training problem?

I part ways with the "kids these days" crowd right about here.

The people entering the workforce now spent the years when you'd normally learn workplace small talk at home, on mute, camera off. Nobody practiced the awkward hallway hello. Nobody had the part-time job where an angry customer teaches you to keep eye contact and keep talking. Those were the reps.

Kevin Loux of the workforce group Charlotte Works told WBTV that employers risk "misdiagnosing a structural shift in the economy as a personality flaw with Gen Z."

Call a skill gap a character flaw and you fire people. Call it a skill gap and you train it, which costs a lot less than recruiting their replacement.

What comedy teaches about eye contact

Nobody walks onstage good at this. A new comic stares at the back wall, talks too fast and never once looks at the people they're trying to win over. Then they do it 200 more times, and somewhere around set 150 they look up, catch the guy in the front row and land the joke on him. That's reps with a feedback loop.

Crowd work is active listening at a higher volume. You look at someone, ask a question, actually hear the answer, and respond to what they said instead of what you planned to say. A new analyst needs the same skill in a client meeting, where at least nobody's holding a two-drink minimum.

Comedy also teaches you that fear kills it. A comic who's scared of bombing goes stiff, and a new hire who's scared of saying the wrong thing goes silent and stares. Lecturing doesn't fix fear. Lowering the stakes until they try does.

How to fix Gen Z communication skills at your company

If your plan is to stop hiring Gen Z, good luck: they're already nearly 30% of the U.S. workforce. What works better:

• Put conversation practice in onboarding. Skip the slide about "professional communication" and do actual reps: introducing yourself, taking an instruction and confirming it back, disagreeing politely. Five minutes a day beats a two-hour module.
• Name the cue you want. "When I give you a task, say 'got it' or ask a question" is clearer than "be more engaged," and most new hires will happily do the thing once someone tells them what the thing is.
• Give feedback in private, fast and specific. Correcting someone in a meeting teaches them to talk less in meetings.
• Have managers model it. If leaders hide behind Slack, new hires will too.
• Use humor to lower the stakes. Laughing together is the fastest way I know to get a nervous room talking, and it's the whole idea behind the workshops I run for managers and new hires, including a New Hire Orientation that's more fun and about half as long.

What Gen Z in the workplace needs from employers

Gen Z mostly missed the practice, and not by choice. Companies that keep firing new grads for it will keep paying to replace them. The ones that build the practice in will end up with loyal employees who learned to look up from the phone at their place.

I write more about Gen Z at work and why humor builds trust on teams. And if your new hires are giving you the stare, let's talk about what a few reps could do.