With an increasing number of young workers turning to TikTok and Instagram for career advice, tapping into social media feeds can help leaders and organizations better understand Gen Z applicants and employees.
Sam DeMase is the career expert at hiring site ZipRecruiter and an online influencer whose profiles on Instagram and TikTok have a combined following of almost 900,000 users, many of them Gen Z and millennial workers. DeMase’s “CareerTok” videos offer career advice on topics such as writing resumes, prepping for interviews, and negotiating job offers.
We reached out to DeMase to understand how leaders can best address and communicate about what matters most to young workers. Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
What is on young workers’ minds?
Career pivots are big right now. How can I make a successful career pivot in this market? Another question is, how can I stand out as a candidate in this competitive market? What should my resume look like? How can I set boundaries when I’m new to a workplace? When’s the best time to do it, how do I do it?
There’s sometimes a tone of fear that people have going into their job search and a tone of anxiety and stress because of all the headlines around economic uncertainty, around the fiercely competitive market. Also how quickly job postings get put up and then taken down because we see a hundred-plus applicants in 48 hours. So I would say due to the competition and the fluctuations in the economy, there is a sense of fear and stress.
That’s across the board—from people who are at the executive level, middle management, all the way down to entry level. For Gen Z, it feels particularly potent because with entry-level jobs, there’s this aura of, ‘Is my entry-level job going to be replaced by AI? Is my entry level job going to be automated?’ Gen Z has a unique pressure, a unique anxiety in that sense, but I feel like that anxiety is being felt across generations.
For candidates who are super prepared and confident in their superpowers, though, there still is a lot of opportunity right now to make progress. It’s just about how you look at it, how you frame it.
How do you define superpowers and encourage people to identify them?
If you don’t know your superpowers—the top three things that you’re really good at—and the results that you achieve, it is really difficult to build a really powerful resume, a powerful interview narrative, and a value proposition. So that’s typically where I start when job seekers are struggling with confidence or getting hits on their resume. It’s like, do you know your superpowers and do you know them explicitly and in detail? From there, you can actually build a really compelling resume, interview narrative, and negotiation leverage. And it gives you a huge boost of confidence in your job search.
If you’re a leader, you have a responsibility to identify and celebrate those unique strengths within your team. You should be able to say this person’s really good at interpersonal, this person’s really good at data analytics. You should be able to identify those strengths, speak to those, and let your team members know, ‘Hey, I noticed this in you. You’re really good at this.’
You can do it as a team in an icebreaker or dedicated meeting. Ask your team to take the CliftonStrengths assessment or another strength-finding tool, and kick off a meeting with a quick deck based off of everybody’s results. It’s extremely effective to point out and individualize everyone’s strengths, and then you can also point out areas where people are complementary and where people have common ground. Run through each slide with everybody and talk about how you see these strengths manifesting in the day-to-day. Does this seem accurate? Just go through it and have a discussion.
In one-on-ones, I would recommend making professional development a regular closing agenda item for every meeting. In addition to touching on projects, questions, weekly wins, and challenges, professional development should always be at the end of every one-on-one. It gives an opportunity to open up that discussion so you can talk about questions including, ‘What’s a skill that is new to you?’ or ‘What’s a skill that is required for the next level up that you’re working on right now that you want to hone?’ If they’re interested in getting promoted, ‘Great, let’s take a look at the job description. What are the skill sets that you need? Where are the gaps? And how can I help you fill those gaps, either with assigned work, stretch projects, shadowing me, whatever it may be?’
How should c-suite executives and other senior leaders use their LinkedIn and other social media pages?
Candidates certainly do look at it the same way that an employer is googling us, we are also heavily researching them as well. It goes both ways. A c-suite person who has a robust, joyful home life outside of work is a huge green flag for Gen Z candidates and millennial candidates. We do not want to work for a boss whose job is their life because our expectation is that they will want our job to be life too. So it’s really great to see when they’re able to showcase a robust, dynamic, diverse home life. And you can kind of see that and you’re like, this is a real human being that is authentic and that understands that work is not the be all and end all. We have complex lives and we can balance. So leadership that’s showcasing balance in a healthy way is a green flag.