AI hiring, work surveillance leave Gen Z as unhappy as the jobless

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — Gen Z is facing a systemic crisis within the modern labor market, navigating a grueling job application process dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) and entering workplaces defined by intense surveillance and a lack of autonomy. 

This has culminated in a significant rise in despair and unhappiness among workers under 25, according to research from Blanchflower and Bryson, challenging perennial stereotypes about younger generations being “unemployable.”

Grueling and dehumanizing hiring process

Jessica Grose, an opinion writer at The New York Times, notes that with most applications submitted online, the barrier to applying is low, resulting in hundreds of applicants for any open role and creating a pervasive sense of scarcity. 

This competition is intensified by the use of AI, which now performs initial screening rounds, leading applicants to describe interviews with bots and strategize by reviewing their résumés for keywords that algorithms favor.

This digitally mediated process has been described by participants as “dystopian,” gamifying the pursuit of employment and minimizing human contact. The experience is compounded by the fact that selective colleges frequently highlight record-low admissions rates, embedding this sense of intense competition and rejection early in a young person’s life. 

The result, as one economist described it, is an “awful traffic jam” where new graduates struggle to merge onto the career freeway.

Workplace intensification and surveillance

Once employed, young workers encounter a work environment that offers less support and more scrutiny, a phenomenon economists link to “intensifying.” 

Grose writes that young employees report feeling overworked and underappreciated, with managers expecting them to perform the work of multiple roles within a standard workweek while offering little mentorship or opportunities for professional growth. 

This is exacerbated by the widespread use of “bossware,” or surveillance technologies that track productivity through metrics like keyboard use, movements, and phone calls.

This constant monitoring fails to account for critical, non-measurable activities, reducing employees to automatons. The resulting lack of job control and autonomy is a fundamental detriment to job quality. 

While older workers may recall a time before such tracking was ubiquitous and may now possess the seniority to push back, Gen Z enters a workforce where this surveillance is often a baseline condition, leading some to choose the uncertainty of freelancing over the oppression of micromanagement.

Measurable crisis of young worker despair

The cumulative impact of these workplace conditions is a documented and sharp decline in the mental health of young workers. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that despair among young workers has been rising in the United States. 

In a separate study by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, researchers created a mental despair measurement based on bad mental health days. The study analyzed federal health survey data from 400,000 Americans. They found that workers under 25 are now generally as unhappy as their unemployed counterparts.

This unhappiness is particularly pronounced among women and those with lower levels of education. Supporting data from The Conference Board reveals that last year, job satisfaction for people under 25 was about 15 points lower than for those over 55, a stark contrast to a year when satisfaction rose for every other age group. 

Researchers propose that this is the result of a confluence of shifting expectations and the objective reality that the workplace is significantly worse, which is the cause of Gen Z’s particular responses, such as a lack of interest in entrepreneurship and unionization as a potential solution. 

In this way, the technological mediation of recruitment and employment monitoring is triggering a quantifiable degradation of the mental health of young workers and a paradigm shift in the way young workers are structurally oriented towards labour, which promises to bring future trends of demands for autonomy to radically reform the corporate hierarchies and hasten the trend towards collective contracting and entrepreneurship.