Vince Carrabba is chairman & CEO of Specialized, an integrated family of security providers including AURIX, M1 Global and Metro One.
For two decades, startups owned the playbook on attracting young talent. Free lunch, table tennis setups and beer on tap. Many major tech companies engineered environments designed to keep smart people in the building longer—fed, caffeinated and stimulated enough to move at a pace that older, slower companies couldn’t match. It worked for a while, but that narrative is cracking.
According to RationalFX findings, nearly 245,000 tech workers were laid off globally in 2025. The wave hasn’t slowed, as a Challenger, Gray & Christmas report found that the announced technology job cuts in the first quarter of 2026 were already running 40% ahead of the same period in 2025. Firms that promised young talent a place to build and grow are now cutting back. This has created a sense of fear and anxiety among many Gen Z and Millennial workers who bet on these companies at the start of their careers.
According to Deloitte, financial insecurity among Gen Zers jumped from 30% to 48% in a single year. Nearly half are living paycheck to paycheck. They’re not worried about some distant future. They’re worried about rent and whether the company that called itself a “family” in the onboarding deck will still exist in two years.
Pay still tops the list of Gen Zers’ workplace priorities—but unlike every generation before them, they hold it loosely. According to a Deloitte survey, given the choice between a higher salary and more interesting work, they’re nearly split down the middle. The companies best positioned to win their loyalty aren’t just the ones that pay the most. They’re the ones that have weathered recessions, survived a global pandemic and stood the test of time.
What Legacy Firms Promise That Startups Can’t
I run a company that’s been in business for over 30 years. We’re founder-led and family-owned, and we operate in an industry (physical security) that doesn’t get many headlines for disruption or glamour. For most of that time, some said companies such as ours couldn’t compete for top young talent. We’re too slow, too old-school and not exciting enough.
I believe job security is a myth, but it’s relative. In my mind, a 30-year-old company with financial stability can offer a young person much more. When I tell someone this company will be here in five years, I can prove it. We don’t have a board of investors who need their money back on a timeline or a PE firm deciding in a quarterly meeting that headcount needs to come down 20%. We can look at our margins and choose to reinvest instead of extract—and we do because this is our company, and we’re building something we actually want to last.
How To Recruit And Retain The Builders
Many Gen Z employees gravitate toward startups because they’ve bought into the vision of building something real and starting from zero where they can create a legacy. However, a legacy firm that prioritizes innovation can incorporate the next generation of leadership into its evolution.
Here’s how to find and keep great talent:
• Recruit differently. Go outside your comfort zone. Look at candidates from companies known for high performance and high pressure. Someone who thrives in Amazon’s fast-paced, metrics-focused culture will thrive in an environment that rewards results.
• Lead with the vision, not the resume. The people who stay at a legacy company are the ones who believe in where it’s going. That means you have to actually tell them. Walk them through what you’re building, what you want it to become and, specifically, where they fit into that future.
• Make mentorship real. Not a program. Not a quarterly check-in. The most effective mentorship I’ve seen is when a senior leader genuinely wants to watch someone take something further than they could themselves. When that’s authentic, young people feel it. When it’s performed, they feel that, too.
• Let them remap how you work. The strongest signal you can send a young, innovative hire is that you want their ideas, not just their execution. Go to them and tell them that you want them to help you rethink how something works.
• Hire for culture, not just competency. A wrong hire is expensive at any company. At a smaller, founder-led firm, one bad fit can affect an entire team. The people who thrive in legacy environments have something in common: They want to build, they can handle ambiguity, and they don’t need the machine to be set up for them before they can start.
The Thing You Can’t Fake
Here’s what I’d tell any legacy CEO who’s being advised to modernize their culture to attract young talent: Don’t pretend.
Our mission statement isn’t aspirational. It reflects what we actually are. That’s the difference. You can feel it at the holiday party. You can see it in the fact that leaders who’ve been here for decades are genuinely excited to watch younger people take what they built and push it further. We didn’t have to manufacture that. We just had to be honest about it.
That said, not everyone is a fit for it. Some people come in looking for a machine that’s already running, and when they find something messier, faster and more demanding than they expected, they leave. That’s fine. The ones who stay are the ones you wanted.
What This Moment Is Actually About
Gen Zers aren’t disloyal, lazy or unreasonable for wanting job security. They’re responding rationally to a job market that has handed them one broken promise after another. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a distress signal.
My advice to them: Commitment is part of your value. Don’t leave for a lateral move. Stay somewhere long enough to actually build something, four to seven years at minimum, and when you leave, leave upward. The longevity on your resume is a signal to the right employer that you’re someone worth investing in.
My advice to the CEOs of scaleups: Stop trying to imitate startups. You likely have something they can’t manufacture—a track record, a culture that predates any current marketing initiative and the structural freedom to make decisions that are actually in your people’s long-term interest.
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