Why your Gen Z staff leave in the first year

The exit interview is the wrong place to find out why your Gen Z staff leave. By then the story has been tidied up. “Better opportunity.” “More money.” “Wasn’t the right fit.” All true, none of it the real reason.

I have hired young staff, led them, and lost some of them. I have also spent most of the last decade working with young people across Australia, and I am Gen Z myself. The pattern I see is the same in a 20-person charity and a 20,000-person bank. Gen Z turnover is a first-year problem, and it is decided at five moments that most leaders never notice.

First, the numbers, because the scale of this is bigger than most executives think.

The scale of the first-year problem

Randstad’s Gen Z Workplace Blueprint, released in October 2025, found Gen Z had a 22% attrition rate over the previous 12 months, the highest of any generation, and that one in three planned to leave their current role within a year. In Australia the picture was sharper still. Only 6% of Gen Z workers said they wanted to stay with their current organisation indefinitely, and 47% were planning an early career break, compared with 39% of Millennials and 25% of Gen X.

Read that 6% again. It does not mean 94% are about to quit. It means almost nobody in their early twenties is assuming your organisation is where they will be in five years. The default has flipped. Staying is now a decision that has to be earned, every year, and the first year is where it is won or lost.

The five moments

1. The first week: the job was oversold

Most first-year exits start in the interview. The role was described as fast-moving, high-impact and full of growth. Week one is a laptop that does not work, a manager who is in back-to-back meetings, and a task list that was clearly written for someone else.

Gen Z grew up fact-checking everything in real time. The gap between the pitch and the reality is noticed on day one and it is remembered. The fix is not a better pitch. It is a truer one. Tell them what the first three months actually look like. If the first month is admin and shadowing, say so, and say why it matters.

2. The first month: no real work

The 22-year-old who is given nothing but “get your head around things” for six weeks is not grateful for the easy start. They are quietly concluding that this organisation does not need them.

Give new staff something real in the first fortnight. Small, bounded, and theirs. A problem to solve, a process to improve, a piece of work with their name on it. The point is not the output. The point is the signal: we hired you because we need you.

3. The first manager: answers without questions

This is the one I would fix first. The manager who gives a new team member every answer, every process and every rule, and never once asks “what do you think?” has told that person exactly what their opinion is worth.

Gen Z does not expect to run the place at 23. We do expect to be asked. A manager who opens with questions, even when they already know the answer, builds something a pay rise cannot buy. The best leaders I have worked with ask first, decide second, and explain third.

4. The first review: no visible next step

Gen Z does not leave because the ladder is long. We leave because we cannot see it. By the first formal review, usually somewhere between three and six months, a young employee has decided whether there is a next step here or not.

That decision is made on evidence. Have they seen anyone get promoted? Has anyone described what the next role looks like and what it would take? Is there a development conversation, or only a performance one? If the answer to all three is no, the person is already looking, and the review just confirms it.

5. The value clash nobody explains

Every organisation has rules that look strange from the outside. Return-to-office mandates, approval chains, a dress code, a tool everyone hates. Older staff have learned to live with them. New staff ask why, and the answer they usually get is “that’s just how we do it here.”

Gen Z was raised on the why. The rule itself is rarely the problem. The missing explanation is. Leaders who explain the reasoning behind a rule, and are willing to change the rule when the reasoning no longer holds, keep young staff through things that would otherwise push them out.

What keeps them

Put the five moments together and the answer is not complicated. Tell the truth in the interview. Give real work in week one. Ask before you tell. Show the next step before the first review. Explain the why. None of it costs money, and all of it has to be done by the direct manager, which is why retention programs run from head office so often fail.

The organisations that keep Gen Z staff past the first year are not the ones with the best perks. They are the ones where a 22-year-old can look around in month three and see that they are needed, heard and going somewhere. Randstad’s finding that only 6% plan to stay indefinitely is not a verdict on young people. It is a verdict on how many workplaces give them a reason to.

This is the thinking behind my keynote on staff retention and Gen Z at Work. If your first-year turnover is higher than you would like, check my availability for your next leadership or HR event.