Stop the world.
That’s right. Slam on the brakes. Lock ’em up. Bring the orbital spin to a screeching halt. And let the planet stand in hushed, anticipatory awe. Another generation has arrived. Oh, joy.
We haven’t yet completed the onslaught of all the re-inventing we were supposed to be doing because of (in deference to, to pander to, to attract, to mollify, to sell stuff to, etc.) Milllennials. And now this: “How to Recruit Generation Z Graduates“. Good grief.
More companies have made their marketing more limited and limiting out of more misbegotten efforts to target Millennials than I would ever have imagined. Millennials want this. Millennials are looking for that. Millennials won’t settle, do without, or forego just about anything you might care to dream up. It’s as if everyone else in the (working) world had suddenly vanished and been replaced by Millennials. And none of the junk we read about all of the hoops we’re supposed to jump through for Millennials was written by Millennials. Am I the only one who noticed that? (As Exhibit A, please see this post and its ensuing comments. Thank you, Becky Risher and Rachel Coan.)
As a result, and needless to say, I approached the piece about Generation Z with queasy trepidation. I read it once and felt only mildly dyspeptic. Oddly enough, I also felt faint glimmers of something like … was it hope? I wasn’t sure. So I read the piece again. And there, nestled innocuously among 632 other words, all but lost in the conditions, caveats, contingencies, criteria, constraints, and characteristics we’ll need to contemplate and by which we’ll need to accommodate Generation Z, I found these eight words:
Gen Zers care about salary, benefits and advancement.
What? They’re people? They want the same things the rest of us do (with the possible exception of Milliennials)? How can this be? We don’t really need to stop the world — or turn it inside out or upside down? This doesn’t really need to be The Next Big Panic? Well … what do we do now?
If we’ve reached the end of the alphabet with Generation Z, we have to presume the next one will be Generation AA. What the hell will it want? It already has its own battery. Actually, it’s probably more important to try to imagine what we’re going to think it wants.
Don’t be surprised when we’re surprised to find out Generation AA is people, too.
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Image by quimono, courtesy of pixabay.com.
