Boss Says Gen Z Workers Should Be 'Willing To Work For Free' & 'Do Anything' Because That's How She Got Ahead
Why would you insist others endure an unfair system just because you had to?
Ground Picture | Shutterstock It doesn't seem to matter how much we talk about how unfair and close to impossible it is to get a career going nowadays; there will always be people who defend the system of having to work for free in internships to get a foot in the door.
Case in point: Squarespace Chief Marketing Officer Kinjil Mathur recently gave an interview about how hard and long she worked for free to get where she is today and the advice she has for Gen Z because of it.
Mathur said Gen Z should be willing to work for free to find their first job.
In an interview with Fortune, Mathur spoke at length about her 20-year journey from slogging it out in the tech and fashion industries to ascending to the C-suite of the $6 billion software company Squarespace. The advice she gave for today's young upstarts has proven very controversial.
Mathur told Fortune that, like many of today's young people, she was "worried about her future" 20 years ago when she began her career because of how hard it is to get a foot in the door.
But she quickly figured out the secret to getting her career rolling — working for free.
Mathur said she started her career calling companies in the phone book and offering to work for free.
"Every single summer, I was trying to find some internship. I just wanted to get experience," Mathur told Fortune, saying that her search began her freshman year at the University of Texas.
"This is when we used to have telephone books where you had yellow pages that had the name and number of every business and every person in your city," she said. "I went to the business listings and I just started calling up companies and asking them if they had internships available and that I would be willing to work for free.”
It eventually worked, landing her an internship at Travelocity doing research and admin work. That internship led to another, which led to another.
Lyubov Levitskaya | Shutterstock
"By the time that I was a junior, I had enough real-world experience that when I went into these interviews," she said, "I could talk about them and talk about business in a way that resonated with the people interviewing me because I had been doing it for a little while."
This meant that in her 20s, she was experienced far beyond what her age would suggest, and it allowed her career to grow and flourish quickly and deeply.
Mathur said Gen Z job seekers need to be 'willing to do anything' like she was to get their careers started.
Mathur told Fortune that there's no real key to her success beyond her go-getter attitude, and she thinks Gen Z needs to follow suit — specifically by letting go of their lists of must-haves for jobs and pounding the pavement instead.
"The list of criteria for people coming out of college, or in college, right now is so long,” she said. She urged Gen Zers to take the opposite approach by instead having an attitude that says, "If anyone can give me any kind of experience, I would be forever indebted to them."
She said this includes being "willing to work for free" and to work any hours on any day of the week. "You really have to just be willing to do anything, any hours, any pay, any type of job," she said. "Just really remain open.”
You can probably guess how well her advice went over.
Mathur's advice infuriated people because of how totally out of touch it was.
Mathur's right about a couple of things — if you want to get ahead, you have to be willing to play the game. Because of the insanely inequitable ways our economy and job market work, that often means making uncomfortable sacrifices and delaying gratification when it comes to our dream job wish lists.
What she completely and utterly ignored, however, is that this game is entirely inaccessible to the vast majority of workers, especially in today's economy. As one person on Reddit put it, "most of us can't turn to Daddy … to pay our bills." Being able to take unpaid internships requires enormous privilege.
Mathur giving "advice" about how she was able to work multiple jobs for free for literal years without ever discussing how exactly she stayed alive is the perfect example of "being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple."
Someone financed her life during all that free work time. Refusing to discuss it renders her advice completely meaningless to anyone but the affluent.
And here's a dirty secret almost no one is willing to acknowledge from a guy who's spent 20 years in the media and entertainment industries — the longer you work, the more you notice that virtually everyone running the show got there the same way Mathur likely did. They slogged their guts out for free at internships that should frankly be illegal while their parents paid their rent.
Everyone else mostly claws their way to the middle, at best. There are always exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule more than they negate it.
Telling people to be go-getters and make their own opportunities is good advice. But if Mathur really wanted to help people, she'd also call on her fellow business leaders to stop treating people trying to get a foot in the door like indentured servants and saying anyone who can't endure it just doesn't want it enough.
Otherwise, her "advice" is the very definition of pulling up the ladder behind you.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.