Positioning Your Professional Services Firm To Attract Gen Z Talent
Over the next fifteen years, the American workforce will undergo a seismic shift. Baby Boomers will fully retire, and Gen Xers won’t be far behind. And that means Gen Z (those born between 1996 and 2010, currently 14 to 28 years old) will soon make up a significant share of your prospective talent pool. Is your professional services firm ready for this inevitable sea change?
The Cultural Context of Gen Z
Gen Z has been shaped by vastly different cultural contexts than previous generations. Two events in particular — Covid-19 and the Great Recession — have influenced how members of this emerging generation approach their professional and personal lives. Whereas older generations considered things like flexible hours, work/life balance, and high pay to be hard-won rewards, Gen Z expects them as a given.
What’s more, Gen Zers care deeply about working for organizations that meaningfully align with their personal values and ideals. These realities create risk for firms like yours, especially if your current culture doesn’t match Gen Z expectations. Many Gen Zers are uniquely uninterested in chasing the proverbial brass ring. They want to do good, interesting work — but they also want to enjoy rich, full personal lives. If these priorities appear to conflict, conventional wisdom predicts a crisis for professions that serve the most challenging and sophisticated clients.
Strategies for Executive Positioning
Managers are fearful that a refusal to bend on cultural change will drive talent away. To mitigate this, you can address the challenge with the following strategic steps:
- Define your audience – You may only want Gen Zers who still aspire to the brass ring – they exist, no generation is a monolith. But focusing on that cohort may turn away the best talent and limit the diversity and alacrity of thought you can access. Either way, the first step is to define the audience you want to attract and retain.
- Create a feedback loop – Effective communication requires a feedback loop. This can include formal and informal channels through which you gather input from your audience, identify expectations, and measure whether your messages are landing as intended.
- Declare what you stand for – Create a process that is open to a diversity of stakeholders and engage them in a conversation about the values and principles that drive behavior at your firm. Clarify how you will make decisions that impact all the generations in your workforce and publish your guidelines for all to see.
- Reiterate and reinforce – If you can identify and occupy the space in which the firm’s priorities and expectations overlap with your audience’s values and aspirations, then you can alter your culture to encourage greater engagement. With every alteration you make to workplace culture, reiterate, and reinforce the values that drove the decision.
Meaningful Work and Culture
What sort of alterations are appropriate? Corporate Counsel underscores the need to move beyond “no-meeting Mondays and free-pizza Fridays.” Such perks simply don’t go far enough to create the kind of culture that appeals to Gen Z. While aspects of your firm’s culture may be difficult, if not impossible, to change, there is room to maneuver within the “softer” elements of your culture that you can control.
Much of our recent guidance is rooted in this assertion: if you are clear about what your firm stands for and can demonstrate how its values and expectations are in alignment, you will have an easier (or at least less fraught) time communicating and protecting the firm’s reputation.