Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
Helicopter parenting reaches new heights
With increasing frequency, Gen Z parents are writing résumés, calling recruiters, joining job interviews and negotiating salaries
Gen Z sure do get a bad rap in the world of work, and it could be argued much of it is undeserved gripes from cantankerous elders. But you might be less inclined to come to their defence for this one: a lot more of them are being hand-held through the job search process by mom and dad.
A new survey from Zety found parental involvement, which it dubs ‘career co-piloting’, is a growing occurrence, even in job interviews. The survey found 44 per cent of Gen Z workers said their parents had helped write or edit their résumés, while parents are contacting potential employers or recruiters for 21 per cent of young workers.
Even more surprising might be the direct involvement: 20 per cent said a parent had actually joined a job interview — with three quarters of those respondents saying they brought a parent to an in-person interview. One in ten even had a parent negotiate their salary.
“What’s most striking isn’t that parents are involved, it’s how involved they’ve become,” said Zety career expert Jasmine Escalera. “We’re seeing parents move beyond advice and into action, from résumé edits to interview prep and even negotiating offers.”
This isn’t the first time surveys have found a high level of parental involvement with Gen Z jobseekers. Last year, a ResumeTemplates.com survey found that 31 per cent had a parent write their résumé, and 53 per cent had a parent speak to a hiring manager on their behalf. Eighty per cent said a parent communicated with their manager, with around half of those saying it was a frequent occurrence.
Look, the job market is hard out there, particularly for new grads. And sure, these parents might be eager to get their young adult children on their feet — and perhaps out of the basement. But career strategists like Julia Toothacre don’t think much of this elevated level of involvement.
“Parents can be supportive behind the scenes, but they shouldn’t participate directly,” Toothacre said. “It not only undermines the child’s credibility but also risks stunting their professional growth and ability to navigate challenging situations.”
Indeed, the best advice here makes both for good jobseeking and good parenting: let them spread their own wings. “Many hiring managers will question whether the job candidate is ready for a full-time job if they need help in the interview,” HR adviser Tim Elmore wrote on LinkedIn. “Encourage [parents] that stepping back will allow their child to bloom and will increase their job chances.”
Junior high
Led by an abrupt about-face at IBM, corporations are rethinking entry-level talent in the age of AI
The rise in AI tech, along with a general (and related) trend of cutting headcount, has had a rough impact on one group of workers in particular: entry-level, junior staff.
“AI means the end of entry-level jobs,” declared The Wall Street Journal last December — and that’s just one of a raft of eulogies for entry-level work. Privately, though, many have wondered where the limits of that line of thinking are — how deep can a company cut its entry-level talent pipeline and still manage to carry on?
In one of the first major about-faces of the AI hiring era, IBM may have just conceded it has found the limit. After it laid off 8,000 people at the end of last year, citing the shift to AI, the computer company slammed on the brakes this month and announced it was tripling its entry-level hiring targets for 2026. “It’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” the company’s chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, told a conference last week.
LaMoreaux wasn’t necessarily saying AI wasn’t working, or there weren’t productivity gains to be realized, but she was arguing that the belief in treating AI as a substitute for human labour was short-term thinking, and that the technology will only be a positive if it’s accompanied by investment in humans.
“The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” she said. “Build the business case now; even though it may not seem so obvious to your leaders, because AI is going to make your job easier three years from now.”
The crux of this approach comes in rethinking the entry-level jobs to include more AI fluency, LaMoreaux explained — a notable divergence from large swaths of the employment market, where AI has led companies to slash entry-level hiring and condense roles, a strategy that critics worry will create a long-term talent shortage and lower overall morale.
Other companies are whistling a similar tune. Dropbox, for instance, said it is expanding its internship and new graduate programs by 25 per cent to try to capitalize on AI. And IT firm Cognizant also said it was expanding, not contracting, the number of entry-level hires.
“I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight,” Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant, told Fortune. “AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.”
Would you turn down extra cash for more vacation?
When it comes to rewarding workers, time off as a bonus makes people feel more human
A quick question: What is more likely to make you feel valued for going above and beyond at work — a bit of extra cash or some extra time off?
Much of the work world relies on monetary bonuses, including overtime pay, to motivate workers — but a new research paper suggests time off might be a better way to go.
“Receiving vacation significantly increased employees’ feelings of humanness compared to equivalent monetary bonuses,” wrote researchers Alice Lee-Yoon and Sanford Ely DeVoe in the Journal of Managerial Psychology. “Organizations aiming to enhance employee well-being and reinforce humane workplace values might benefit from incorporating time-based rewards into their incentive structures.”
Approaching the question from the lens of ‘feeling more human’ is an interesting one. They aren’t necessarily asking which form of incentive produced better results, or which one the workers preferred, but the authors believe that feelings of ‘humanness’ were important, because it formed the foundation of a relationship between employee and employer. In one of their experiments, they asked 500 participants how they felt about a job that offered time off as a bonus versus a job offering cash, and which company they felt valued them more. The company offering time off topped the list.
“That difference may sound modest, [but] it represents a meaningful psychological shift,” said DeVoe, speaking to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the difference between feeling neutral and feeling genuinely seen as a person.”
That can have powerful knock-on implications. “While there have been lots of studies exploring employees’ negative feelings about work, this research does the opposite — it examines the positive feelings employees experience,” wrote UCLA’s Betsy Morris, who noted that “the non-monetary award gives bosses flexibility,” since “time off awards may be given at a manager’s discretion, and don’t have to be part of an HR benefits package.”
All in all, the researchers suggest it could be a novel way to think about incentives in the post-Covid, RTO era.
“Time, flexibility and work-life quality have become increasingly important, yet many —especially in low-skill roles — lack access to remote or flexible arrangements, raising equity concerns across industries,” wrote Lee-Yoon and DeVoe. “Receiving additional time off increases felt humanness by enhancing psychological segmentation from work, with potential downstream benefits for employee well-being and organizational functioning.”
Smarter tools, harder grind
As AI’s power grows, so does the intensity of our workday
AI might not be making your job any easier — in fact, it might be making it more intense, according to some new research from a pair of researchers from UC-Berkeley.
“The promise of generative AI lies not only in what it can do for work, but in how thoughtfully it is integrated into the daily rhythm,” wrote Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, in the Harvard Business Review.
That has been the crux of its appeal in the business world — it promises to reduce the burden of some work, usually repetitive or boring work, while allowing workers more time to focus on high-value tasks. But only if that is what is actually happening. “We discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it,” the researchers noted, adding that “AI makes it easier to do more, but harder to stop.”
By tracking the work habits and internal communications channels at a medium-sized tech company, the researchers found that work was intensifying in three main ways. First, it was causing task expansion — so, rather than rely on a teammate who is better equipped to tackle a problem, workers were feeding those questions into a generative AI tool, meaning they “absorbed work that might previously have justified additional help or headcount.”
Second, they found that it was causing people to work more. “Workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks,” they found, perhaps writing a few prompts at lunch or while waiting for files to load. “These actions rarely felt like doing more work, yet over time they produced a workday with fewer natural pauses and a more continuous involvement with work.”
And third, they were multi-tasking more often. “Many workers noted that they were doing more at once — and feeling more pressure — than before they used AI, even though the time savings from automation had ostensibly been meant to reduce such pressure.”
The authors argue what work will need in the future is a clear sense of norms and structures to the way AI is used. “When we talk about building an AI practice, we mean being intentional about the rhythm and boundaries of AI-enabled work rather than simply accelerating because the technology makes it possible,” they told a UC Berkeley blog. “That might include building in intentional pauses — brief, structured moments before major decisions to surface a counterargument or explicitly link a choice to organizational goals, so speed doesn’t crowd out reflection.”
This, they suggest, might allow workplaces to harness AI more effectively, rather than be purely reactive to it.
“The question facing organizations is not whether AI will change work, but whether they will actively shape that change — or let it quietly shape them.”
