How to attract and retain Gen Z talent

What Gen Z actually expects from an employer

Salary is their first professional priority. In the SKEMA x EY Talent Barometer, 74% of young talent now place pay at the top of their expectations. The study surveyed 1,609 students and recent graduates in France with less than three years of professional experience, in February 2026 (Ipsos BVA 2026 Talent Barometer for SKEMA Business School and EY).

This contradicts the assumption that has shaped a decade of graduate recruitment. Purpose has not disappeared, but it no longer buys loyalty on its own. The 2025 edition of the same study found that ethics was not yet a decisive factor in long-term retention, whilst 96% of respondents wanted clear opportunities to progress.

One further finding is worth carrying into your hiring conversations. Asked which skills matter most for professional success, respondents named critical thinking (60%), emotional intelligence (43%) and creativity (37%). Those are the capabilities young talent believe will protect them, and they are a useful signal of what your development offer should contain.

Why the usual playbook is not working

The gap between what employers offer and what young talent asks for shows up in the retention data rather than the recruitment data.

Among American employers, retention sorts early-career hires by how much of the organization they saw before they joined. More than three-quarters of new hires who had interned with the employer are still there after one year, and more than half after five. Among hires who interned somewhere else, nearly two-thirds remain after a year and nearly half after five. Among hires with no internship experience at all, fewer than half are there after a year, and only around a third after five (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2026 Internship & Co-op Report, 284 organizations surveyed between October 2025 and January 2026).

Read that the other way round, and it is a warning. An intake that arrives cold loses more than half of itself within five years. In the same market, more than eight in ten graduates hired in one year were still with the organization twelve months later, so the difference between the groups is not the generation (NACE, 2024 Recruiting Compensation Report). It is the route in.

In most of these cases, the strategy holds up until the person joins, and then breaks.

Attracting Gen Z starts before they reach the job market

The most effective moment to reach this generation is while they are still studying, and most employers arrive later than that.

Internships, apprenticeships, and campus events put your organization in front of candidates before they are comparing offers, at a point where the relationship is professional rather than transactional. They also let you test fit in both directions. A student who has spent six months in your organization is not a hiring risk in the way an unknown graduate applicant is, and that group is far less likely to leave in the first months.

More than 9,000 SKEMA students take up an internship or apprenticeship each year, for periods of two to 24 months. Employers reach them through the school's recruitment events, including career fairs and sector days built around finance, audit and consulting, and luxury. Organizations that want a structured presence rather than a single appearance can recruit early-career talent through the school's job posting tools and placement calendar, or build a longer arrangement through corporate partnership options covering recruitment, employer brand and teaching involvement.

Building an employer brand this generation believes

Young talent checks your claims against your employees. The distance between what an organization promises and what a new joiner finds is one of the more reliable predictors of early departure, and it is self-inflicted.

Pay transparency in the advert does more work than a values statement, because salary is the first filter this cohort applies. Evidence does more than assertion, which in practice means letting current junior employees describe the work. And the role should be described as it is, including the repetitive parts. An oversold graduate job tends to produce a resignation within the year.

Hiring processes that do not lose them

Speed and clarity decide most early-career applications. Long silences between stages read as disorganization, and candidates with options do not wait.

Set a response time and hold to it. Tell candidates what each stage involves and what you are assessing. Give a decision to the people you reject as well, because your rejected applicants are also your future applicants, and they talk to each other on the courses you recruit from.

What makes Gen Z stay

Visible progression is the strongest retention lever you have. In the 2025 edition of the SKEMA x EY Talent Barometer, conducted by Opinionway among more than 840 students, 96% wanted opportunities to progress, and 48% expected competitive pay. American graduating seniors rank the same thing first: asked what they want in an employer, they name career growth and advancement ahead of a good benefits package, job security, friendly colleagues, and a high starting salary (NACE, 2026 Student Survey, more than 17,000 students at 258 institutions, results reported for more than 1,860 graduating seniors). Retention follows a legible career path more closely than it follows perks.

Four levers do most of the work:

• A career path the employee can describe. If a junior cannot say what the next step is and roughly when it happens, they will look for it elsewhere.
• Pay that matches the market, reviewed annually. Salary is the first stated priority of this cohort.
• Managers who give frequent, specific feedback. For a junior employee, the line manager is the daily experience of the organization.
• Training that continues past onboarding, particularly on the tools the work actually uses.

The AI question both sides are getting wrong

Employers and young talent share the same concern about artificial intelligence and rarely discuss it with each other.

On the employer side, the concern is narrower than the headlines. Just over half of employers, 52%, say AI has not reduced the need for entry-level workers' tasks at all, and 27% say it has done so moderately, while not one said completely. Fourteen per cent discuss replacing early-career work frequently, and 44% never do, and only 11% discuss AI in terms of positions no longer being needed (NACE, Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, 157 respondents). On the candidate side, 74% of young talent believe AI could threaten junior roles (SKEMA x EY Talent Barometer 2026). The distance between those two readings is the conversation nobody is having.

The same study is often quoted to say that this generation uses AI at work. It does not say that. It reports that 96% have already used generative AI tools and 61% use them at least daily, but that use is mostly academic and personal, and professional use accounts for a minority of it. They arrive fluent in the tools and inexperienced in applying them to your context, which is a training gap rather than a skills surplus.

The same survey found that 79% want to be trained in AI tools, 40% expect a clear ethical charter, and 48% want AI to remain a support tool rather than a monitoring one. Employers are already halfway there without saying so: 58% assign their interns projects that use AI tools and skills, while rating recent graduates lower on AI skills than on any other career-readiness competency (NACE, Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update). The work is being handed out. The framework around it is not.

Answering the concern is mostly a matter of being explicit. Train juniors on the tools your workflow actually uses. Publish a written position on how AI is used in the organization and how it is not. Say which parts of a junior role you are not planning to automate.

The five C's of retention

There is no single authoritative version of this framework, and it circulates under several names. As a practical grouping of what the evidence above supports, five conditions govern whether an early-career hire stays: compensation that tracks the market, a career path they can describe, coaching from a manager who gives regular feedback, clarity about what the role is and where it leads, and a culture that matches what was advertised.

How to measure whether it works

Track a small number of figures and review them quarterly. For each one, record the baseline, the target, the owner, and the review date.

• Early attrition at 12 weeks, 12 months, and 24 months, which is the clearest signal of a gap between promise and reality.
• Conversion of interns and apprentices into permanent hires, which measures the pipeline built during the study years.
• Offer acceptance rate and the time from application to decision.
• Internal mobility, meaning the share of juniors who move roles rather than leave.

If early attrition is high while offer acceptance is healthy, the problem is what happens after arrival, not your attraction strategy.