Chapter 2. Great Expectations

When Gretchen Neels, a Boston-based consultant, was coaching a group of students for job interviews, she asked them how they believe employers view them. She gave them a clue, telling them that the word she was looking for begins with the letter e. One young man quickly shouted out, "excellent." Not that "e" word, she said. Soon other students chimed in with "enthusiastic" and "energetic." Not even close. The correct answer, she finally said, is "entitled." "Huh?" the students responded, surprised and even hurt to think that managers are offended by their highfalutin opinions of themselves.

"What is it with these girls? It's like generation Y gave way to generation I.D.—I Deserve," Zoe Burden told her husband on the television show Cashmere Mafia. The investment banker was fed up with the two narcissistic young women in her life—her nanny and her office assistant—who were bungling their jobs but still making excessive demands of her.

In a survey of corporate recruiters by The Wall Street Journal and Harris Interactive, that unflattering "e" word "entitled" and two more, "excessive expectations," popped up quite regularly in comments about the millennial generation. When asked how millennials are different from previous generations, survey respondents complained vehemently about their young recruits. A sampling of their comments:

"Enormous sense of entitlement, less willingness to earn their keep."

"Expect too much too soon; very self-centered."

"Lazier, more entitled."

"Want it all delivered to them on a silver platter."

"So entitled they expect to fly up the corporate ladder."

"They believe two years of experience is enough to run their own company."

If there's one overriding perception of millennials, it is that they are a generation with great—and sometimes outlandish—expectations. Although members of most generations were considered somewhat spoiled in their youth, many millennials feel an unusually strong sense of entitlement. Older adults routinely criticize the high-maintenance rookies for wanting too much too soon. In particular, they resent the impatient millennials for expecting overnight advancement from their entry-level jobs. "They want to be CEO tomorrow," is a common refrain from frustrated corporate recruiters. Whatever happened to paying your dues, they wonder. As Zoe of Cashmere Mafia put it, "When I was their age, we were so grateful to have a job and we were so aware of how expendable we were."

The "We Want It All" generation feels no such gratitude. It expects the workplace to adapt to its needs. That means loads of attention and near daily performance feedback from bosses. Millennials also want to learn as much as they can and have as many different experiences as possible. They love praise and count on getting regular promotions and pay raises. By "regular," they mean every six months or so like clockwork.

"Their attitude is always what are you going to give me," says Natalie Griffith, manager of human resource programs at Eaton Corp., an industrial manufacturer. "It's not necessarily arrogance; it's simply their mindset." But it can be a costly point of view. One job candidate was rejected after a second-round interview, when he asked what Eaton could do for him, rather than what he could contribute to the company.

"Once they're hired, they want the big stuff right off the bat," Griffith adds. "Coming out of leadership training, they'll shoot for higher salaries right away. One woman asked for higher wages because she felt she deserved them, given the reputation of the school she was coming from and the fact that she thought her college projects should be considered experience."

Veronica Woody, head of International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM's) Extreme Blue internship program for elite engineering and M.B.A. students, finds expectations much higher than when she looked for a summer job. "I just wanted an internship to help with college expenses and to give me some experience," she says. "This generation of students has a lot more chutzpah. They want to work on cool things and emerging technology that could change the world."

That's not all the millennial generation wants. Its expectations include much more than collecting fat salaries and doing groundbreaking work. Millennials also seek a flexible work routine that allows them time for their family and personal interests. Being very civic minded, they believe employers should provide opportunities for them to volunteer for community service. While they're at the office, they'd like to be able to dress casually, plug into their iPods and social networks, communicate electronically rather than face-to-face, and have a little fun, too. Worst of all from an employer's perspective, millennials often resign after a year or two—maybe even sooner—if they don't feel that all of their myriad needs are being satisfied.

More than 85% of hiring managers and human resource executives said they feel that millennials have a stronger sense of entitlement than older workers, according to a survey by the online jobs site CareerBuilder.com. The generation's greatest expectations: higher pay (74% of respondents), flexible work schedules (61%), a promotion within a year (56%), and more vacation or personal time (50%).

"They really do seem to want everything, and I can't decide if it's an inability or an unwillingness to make tradeoffs," says Derrick Bolton, assistant dean and M.B.A. admissions director at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. "They want to be CEO, for example, but they say they don't want to give up time with their families. If millennials feel this way because they can't make up their minds, it's not a good thing. They have to make decisions if they expect to be leaders."

Some research studies indicate that the millennial generation's expectations stem from feelings of superiority. Michigan State University's Collegiate Employment Research Institute and Monster Trak, an online careers site, conducted a joint research study of 18- to 28-year-olds and found that nearly half had moderate to high superiority beliefs about themselves. The superiority factor was measured by responses to such statements as "I deserve favors from others" and "I know that I have more natural talents than most."

The millennial generation may expect so much because they were never denied much. From the nursery onward, millennials were indulged and made to feel special by parents, coaches, and teachers. Their self-esteem seems to know no bounds. The National Institute on Media and the Family and the Minnesota PTA have even launched a statewide campaign encouraging parents and educators to start saying no to young people more often. They are urging parents to read and heed the advice in the book No: Why Kids—of All Ages—Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It, by David Walsh, president of the institute. The Minnesota campaign blames "discipline deficit disorder" for this generation's inflated expectations and feelings of entitlement.

For their part, millennials believe they are misunderstood. They feel that their confidence and ambition are being misread as narcissism and entitlement. They also believe that they can afford to be picky, with talent shortages looming as graying baby boomers retire or switch to part-time assignments. "They are finding that they have to adjust work around our lives instead of us adjusting our lives around work," a teenage blogger named Olivia writes on the Web site Xanga.com. "What other option do they have? We are hard working and utilize tools to get the job done. But we don't want to work more than 40 hours a week, and we want to wear clothes that are comfortable. We want to be able to spice up the dull workday by listening to our iPods. If corporate America doesn't like that, too bad. They don't have much of a choice because there are other jobs out there that will take us."

She may be right, but sometimes such confidence comes off as cockiness. To employers, arrogance is never attractive, a lesson that many millennials have failed to learn. Neels, the consultant in Boston, often sees smug behavior when she helps students prepare for their job search. When she was conducting an intern recruiting session with M.B.A. students at Harvard Business School, for example, a young man showed up five minutes late casually dressed in cargo pants. Then his cell phone rang. "I thought my head would explode," she says. "Who does this kid think he is?"

Some millennials feel so sure of themselves that they won't even adapt to corporate recruiting schedules. Wachovia Corp., the financial services company, encouraged undergraduates to come to its first "super day" of second-round interviews because most of its job openings might get filled then. Despite the risks of losing the chance to work for Wachovia, some students opted to wait for a later "super day" so they wouldn't miss homecoming weekend at their college.

"It's all about them," says a recruiter for investment banking firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc. "Some students today even complain that the people interviewing them aren't smart enough and haven't read their resumes closely enough. They get upset if a recruiter checks his BlackBerry during an interview and doesn't pay complete attention to them."

Indeed, these outspoken young people tend to be highly opinionated, and fearlessly challenge recruiters and bosses. Status and hierarchy don't impress them much, and they find bureaucracy simply maddening. They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates and expect ready access to senior executives, even the CEO, to share their brilliant ideas. If they bump into the CEO and one of his clients in the elevator, they have no compunction about interrupting and proclaiming, "Hey, I have this great idea I've been meaning to talk to you about."

Many millennials also think nothing of e-mailing top executives and addressing them by their first names. Recruiters at such companies as Goldman Sachs and Amazon.com describe "student stalkers" who brashly fire off e-mails to everyone from the CEO on down, trying to get an inside track to a job. Wachovia even rescinded a job offer to a student who e-mailed the company's top executives because he wouldn't accept the answers he had received from a recruiter and a hiring manager about tuition reimbursement policies.

The millennials' overly familiar behavior makes some older executives bristle. The owner of a public relations agency says it bothers her when her young female employees touch her arm or shoulder as if she's one of their girlfriends. Millennials may not mean to be rude, but their casualness clearly indicates that they don't recognize that age and experience command a certain level of respect.