We Hired Them. We Failed Them. Now We're Blaming Them.

Six in ten companies fired their Gen Z hires in 2024. And in 2025 only 58 percent of companies planned to hire from the graduating class at all.

That number has been making the rounds and everyone has an opinion about it. Entitled. Unmotivated. Can't take feedback. Glued to their phones. I have heard it all.

Before you file this under "kids these days," stay with me for a minute.

The data is real. According to a survey of nearly 1,000 U.S. business leaders, 60 percent had already fired a recent college grad they hired in 2024. Seventy-five percent said some or all of their recent grad hires were unsatisfactory. The top complaint was lack of motivation or initiative, cited by 50 percent of employers. A separate 2025 study found that only 8 percent of hiring professionals believe Gen Z is actually prepared for the workplace.

Eight percent.

Those are significant numbers. And they tell part of the story.

Here is what they do not tell you.

This generation sat through two of their most formative career years in their bedrooms on Zoom. They watched the economy convulse right when they were supposed to be figuring out professional norms. They built their identities in environments that rewarded the performance of confidence over the actual building of it. And most of them walked into their first jobs having never experienced what a functioning workplace culture actually feels like from the inside.

We handed them a runway and never taught them to fly.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Particularly after reading about similar patterns showing up in other countries entirely. Different economies, different cultures, same complaint from employers. The signal is global. Which means this is not a generational character flaw. It is a systemic gap.

We Are Confusing a Skills Gap With a Character Flaw

The behaviors employers describe as lack of initiative are often the result of young people who were never given meaningful difficulty to practice on. Not in school. Not at home. And often not in the hiring process either.

When you have spent years in environments that protected you from failure and rewarded the performance of confidence, entering a workplace that suddenly requires independent judgment is genuinely disorienting. Nobody told them the unwritten rules. Nobody showed them what good looked like from the inside. They were expected to absorb it by osmosis and when they could not, we called it a character problem.

It is also worth noting what Gen Z actually wants. Deloitte's 2025 survey found that 89 percent of them say a sense of purpose is essential to their job satisfaction. They are not checking out because they do not care. They are checking out because nobody connected their work to anything that matters. That is a culture failure, not a generational one.

That is not weakness. That is an underdeveloped muscle in an environment that never asked them to use it.

And underdeveloped muscles can be trained.

Firing Them Is Not a Strategy

Firing them and moving on is not a solution. It is a pattern. And when 60 percent of companies are doing it at the same time, we are not dealing with a hiring problem anymore. We are watching an entire generation get pushed out of the workforce before they ever find their footing. That has consequences that go well beyond any one company's turnover rate. Someone has to decide to solve it.

And solving it starts before the first day. It starts with whether your organization has ever actually defined what good looks like, how decisions get made, how feedback flows, what the unwritten rules are and whether anyone has bothered to write them down. Most have not. And then we act surprised when someone new cannot figure it out.

What Gen Z Is Actually Telling You

The best talent at any age will not stay where they cannot grow. And right now a lot of companies are blaming the people walking out the door instead of looking at what they built.

Gen Z is not a lost cause. They are a mirror. And what they are reflecting back is a workplace culture that was already struggling before they arrived.

If your onboarding is weak, they will show you. If your feedback culture is broken, they will show you. If your leadership is inconsistent, they will absolutely show you. Loudly and quickly in ways that older generations learned to quietly tolerate for decades.

That is not the problem. That is the data point you actually needed.

Lena McDearmid is the Founder and CEO of Wryver. wryver.com