With marketing facing youth unemployment issues, maybe it’s time to let Gen Z get Gen Z into the industry.
It’s a difficult time for young people looking for work. In the UK, the youth unemployment figure stands at 16.2%, with many advanced economies not far behind. Labour grandee Alan Milburn made headlines recently with his report on the crisis, warning of a “lost generation.” In marketing, entry-level vacancies have reportedly fallen by up to 66%.
Against this backdrop, it’s understandable that young people want all the help they can get to find a job in the industry. For Mercy Abel, an award-winning marketer herself and founder of Who You Know, breaking down the barrier between early-career recruits and recruiting organizations is a good first step toward helping.
That’s why the 28-year-old has set up the future workforce consultancy. What is that, you might ask? While WYK (for short) could be seen as a boutique recruitment agency wrapped in Gen Z terminology, the startup, thanks to Abel’s drive and experience, embodies the energy and vision of her generation as well.
As Abel explains: “Everyone kind of doesn’t know what’s next, so the only way we identify what’s next is to learn and understand.” How does she do this? “Within Who You Know, we build a learning ecosystem between businesses and brands and the incoming talent.” Essentially, this involves a mix of one-to-one early career mentoring and hosting events and workshops with hiring organizations for prospective recruits to attend.
Tomorrow’s industry leaders
A Covid graduate, Abel landed a remote-working job at a D&I consultancy, The Unmistakables, working with TikTok, Coca-Cola and Unilever. She then moved to creative agency John Doe, where she built an insights division before taking a wider marketing role.
At an industry event, Abel had a realization: “I couldn’t see anyone who looked like me, or everyone who did look like me was a server.” After chatting with her boss on the train home about how to address the apparent inequality in the industry, she started Unlocked, an internship program to help people from marginalized ethnic backgrounds and lower-income backgrounds gain their first experience in the marketing and creative sectors in Scotland. But it was a further realization that led Abel to found WYK.
“Every job I’ve ever had, I’ve never applied for,” she explains. “It’s always been through a connection, or it’s always been through me putting myself out there, and that’s not because I had someone in the industry.” With nepotism proving a barrier to entry for so many, Abel found that hard graft and handshakes still proved effective. And if she could get into the industry that way, why not others?
As such, WYK aims to help with those first tentative steps in the industry, at a time when the early pipeline is more at risk and more important than ever. After all, today’s new recruits are tomorrow’s industry leaders.
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Creating the flywheel
The idea behind the future workforce consultancy and the ecosystem it entails is that, by bringing together recruiters and recruits, WYK can gain insight into what companies expect from entry-level candidates while staying attuned to what new workers want from their jobs. The magic comes in between: through taking the learning of one group to the other and vice versa.
“We just really want to make sure that whatever learning comes from one side goes into the other side and that cycle keeps going, essentially, and just really do our best to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s coming up in the future and informing all players who are required to understand what each side is looking for,” Abel explains.
Learnings so far? Contrary to reports that Gen Z are workshy and lack resilience, many want stability – a consideration perhaps more typically associated with Gen X and Boomers.
“Gen Z came into the workforce during Covid, when there was no stability, and there was no understanding as to how this is actually going to work,” Abel explains. “But because everything’s so uncertain, stability actually feels quite nice. It’s like, ‘I would like to know that I have a paycheck every month and I would like to know that my nine-to-five looks like this and enables me to then live my five-to-nine.’”
For brands, incorporating this understanding into their messaging to younger recruits means showing them there’s a structured path waiting for them within the organization, but that that path isn’t too rigid.
“Not, ‘You’re in this structure and you’re in this system and you’re only going to be doing ABC,’ but actually being like, ‘Hey, we’re giving you a parameter of structure and you know you’re going to learn this…’ And we’re here for that journey. I think that’s what’s really missing sometimes when it comes to brands and businesses understanding the incoming workforce.”
Abel even suggests that perhaps these labels, so beloved of marketers, hide a more important truth: Gen Z, like Boomers, Gen X, and millennials, are just human after all. And one thing that unites most of us, for better or worse, is that we need a job.
Who You Know hosts a two-day learning experience with Tesco Insurance and Money Services in Glasgow on June 16-17.
