Written for the leaders, owners and professionals of the 11 million businesses with between $50,000 and $50 million in revenue.

Last year, a business.com study found that recent college graduates are struggling to find jobs due to a high volume of applications, flawed AI vetting, smaller professional networks, and phantom listings. But there could be another reason, according to a new survey of almost 1,000 business leaders from Intelligent: they really don’t like Gen Z workers.

The survey found “75% of companies report that some or all of the recent college graduates they hired this year were unsatisfactory.” Further, “1 in 6 hiring managers say they are hesitant to hire from this cohort,” and “9 in 10 hiring managers say recent college graduates should undergo etiquette training.”

We feel obligated to remind hiring managers that age discrimination is illegal. (Also, criticizing young people for their lack of etiquette is a hobby that goes back thousands of years.) Sometimes businesses just need to invest in employee training with a more modern approach.

That said, if you agree with the survey results (without muttering “get off my lawn”), read our guide Should You Hire Experienced Workers or Recent College Graduates?

Authenticity: Embrace the real (not LinkedIn) version of it

Tech stack: Leadership coach Valerie Garcia’s top apps

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Betelgeuse: What’s in a name?

(Courtesy Terry Szuplat)

Young employees are yearning for realness. The next generation wants more than just polished HR marketing images. They’re looking for employers who practice what they preach and ensure pay transparency.

Leadership coach Valerie Garcia, author of We’re Gonna Need Cake: Celebrating Authentic Leadership in a Messy World, spoke with b. about the difference between a feel-good workplace and one that actually feels good. b.: How can workers adapt to corporate culture while bringing their true selves to work?

Garcia: Having worked in corporate for 20 years, I completely understand that push-pull feeling. For me, it really came down to this lie that we’ve been told our whole lives: “Leave your emotions at the door. Fake it ’til you make it.” I lived by that for a really long time until I realized that I wasn’t showing up as myself and it wasn’t making me a great leader. What it was doing was forcing everyone around me to do the same thing: shove the emotions in a drawer and just fake it.

So I stopped doing that. I showed up a little bit messy. I said, “I don’t have my ish together. I make mistakes. I’ve failed. I don’t know what I’m doing all the time.” It created better teams and a better culture around me.

b.: Do you think portraying perfection on social media has started to dwindle?

Garcia: There’s a difference between being messy and being performatively messy. I see a lot of that on LinkedIn, where it’s like, “Oh, I did this. This happened. Look at me. I made a million dollars from it.”

A lot of us feel that pressure to show up shiny, pretty, and Instagram-ready. But the more we don’t, the more people gather around and go, “Oh, my God, thank God, me too. I’m so glad you said that, because I don’t have all the right answers either.” We need to hear that. Otherwise, it’s like, when do I get to that point of perfection?

b.: How do you see the role of authenticity evolving in leadership over the next decade?

Garcia: In the work I do with higher-education organizations, I see the younger generations coming in and they are the first ones to say, “I don’t believe what I see on TV. I don’t believe what I see coming out of AI. I don’t believe the news.”

Authenticity is going to go from just sound bites of, “This is what we stand for as a brand,” or, “We give you these holidays off and that creates our culture,” to, “Hey, we really stand behind these [ideas] by taking action.” Our leaders at political levels and employment levels of all kinds are going to have to figure out what authenticity really looks like. Is it just the shiny, or is there messy in there too?

This interview has been edited for length. Read the full Q&A at business.com.

We’re Gonna Need Cake is available now.

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• Notion: “I don’t get out of bed in the morning until I can type in my Notion app one positive thing that happened the day before. Whenever you get stuck in that sort of, ‘Everything sucks,’ you scroll back and you think, ‘All right, things aren’t really as bad as they seem.’”
• Marco Polo: “A lot more people are moving to having voice conversations instead of typing.”
• LinkedIn: “Definitely one of those where I’m spending more time lately because it feels like we’re having more real conversations about real things.”

(Source: Warner Bros.)

For the first time since 1988, Michael Keaton’s Betelgeuse is spooking theaters — and, yes, his character’s name is spelled differently than the movie’s title. The studio originally chose the “Beetlejuice” spelling to make it easier for audiences to pronounce and remember.

Misspelled brand names are everywhere: Google is a simplification of “Googol,” Reebok of “rhebok,” Flickr of “flicker,” and TikTok of “ticktock.” (Tech particularly loves disemvoweling to navigate trademark hurdles.)

A study from the City University of New York found that simpler spellings lead to more positive perceptions, even if the product — in the study’s case, perfume — is exactly the same. Other studies show that consumers are less likely to support unconventional or complex spellings.

Names like Häagen-Dazs, which was crafted out of thin air to sound exotic, can work. But for most new brands, clarity wins over cleverness. As Handbook for the Recently Deceased explains in the original Beetlejuice film, “Live people ignore the strange and unusual.”

• 1869: At only 22 years old, Thomas Edison filed his first patent (of 1,093 over his accomplished career) for the electric vote-counting machine. It failed to gain popularity.
• 1952: French fashion designer Gaby Aghion founded Chloé. Swiss holding company Richemont purchased the luxury brand in 1985, and recently performed a successful turnaround.
• 1989: Sony purchased Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion in cash. Today, the film company has a market cap of nearly $120 billion.

Written by Antonio Ferme and Ali Saleh. Comic by John McNamee.