Picture a job interview. The candidate walks in with an iced coffee. Another one, a few minutes before the call, sends a text: “Can we reschedule?” A third, in the very first round, asks a question that would once have sounded reckless: “Will I be expected to reply to messages after 7 pm?” Many recruiters find this baffling, and some call it rage-bait. But a few HR leaders admit that, after thinking it over, they saw something different. That 7 pm question, one of them said, was not a sign of low commitment. The candidate was checking the company, just as the company was checking her.
That reading deserves a closer look. What if these young candidates are not careless at all? What if they are doing what any sensible person does before a big decision: asking questions and looking for red flags?
For earlier generations, the interview was a one-way exam. The company judged you, and you were expected to look thankful for the chance. Asking about working hours before you had an offer letter felt like risking the job itself. The mindset was simple: just get the job, and sort out the rest later. But that silent deal only worked if the company also played fair. It had to post real jobs, reply to candidates and treat employees like people. Many young workers feel that this part of the deal has been broken.
Ask any job seeker and you will hear the same story. They apply to an opening, wait for weeks and hear nothing. Surveys in the US suggest this may not be bad luck. In one survey, more than eight in ten recruiters admitted their company had posted jobs with no real plan to fill them. In another, about four in ten companies said they had put up a fake opening in the past year. The reasons are uncomfortable. Some companies want to look like they are growing, and some want to collect résumés just in case. In one survey, a majority of the hiring managers who admitted to this practice said they did it to make their own employees feel replaceable. These are surveys and not exact counts, and they mostly cover the US. Still, a young candidate who has read stories like these has good reason to ask, “Is this role real? Why is it open?”
Then there are the layoffs, which have hit even the biggest names. In 2025, TCS, India’s largest IT services company, announced that it would cut about 2% of its workforce, roughly 12,000 jobs, mostly in middle and senior positions. The company put it down to skill gaps and a changing business, while many observers saw a deeper shift driven by AI and slower spending by clients. Later figures showed its overall headcount falling even further over the year, though the company says the restructuring is now over and hiring has picked up again. Entry-level hiring in Indian IT has also shrunk sharply from its post-pandemic peak, according to industry estimates. A young person today may have watched their seniors lose their jobs, and watched the first rung of the career ladder become harder to reach. When loyalty to a company has not always been returned, it is natural to become careful about who you commit to.
Recruiters have their own complaint, and it is a fair one: some candidates simply vanish. They accept an offer and never join, or they confirm an interview and never show up. About three in four recruiters in India say they have faced this. But the silence goes both ways. A survey in India found that around 73% of job seekers had been ghosted by a prospective employer, and globally the share of candidates reporting employer ghosting has been rising for a few years. Think about what a young candidate learns from this. If you spend hours preparing, sit through three rounds and never even receive a rejection email, you learn that courtesy is optional. Some candidates then behave the same way. That does not make it right, but it does suggest that ghosting is a symptom of a low-trust system and not simply a flaw of one generation.
The 7 pm question makes even more sense when you look at how Indians actually work. One survey found that close to nine in ten Indian employees had been contacted after normal working hours. The issue has even reached Parliament. In December 2025, an MP introduced a private member’s bill, the Right to Disconnect Bill, that would let employees ignore work calls and messages outside their working hours without any penalty. A similar bill in 2019 did not move ahead, and private member’s bills rarely become law, but the fact that the idea keeps coming back shows how tired many people feel. So when a candidate asks about after-hours expectations, they are not avoiding work. They are asking what daily life at the company really looks like before they sign up for it.
It is easy to conclude from all this that Gen Z does not want to work hard, but the evidence does not support that. Surveys of young Indian workers find that almost all of them are interested in senior roles, yet very few say that reaching the top is their main goal. What they want is balance, learning, financial security and work that feels meaningful. Many plan to switch jobs within a couple of years, and often the reason is a search for stability and growth, not a lack of loyalty. They are ambitious. They just want the terms to be clear.
Recruiters have real problems too. No-shows and last-minute cancellations cost time and money, and a candidate who treats an interview like one more errand between other tasks can look unprepared. Not every casual habit is due diligence, and a sloppy attitude is a sloppy attitude in any generation. There is a difference between asking about a company’s culture and ignoring its basic expectations. Dressing neatly and arriving prepared still show respect, and the best candidates do both: they respect the process and they ask sharp questions.
What has really changed is that the interview is slowly turning into a two-way conversation. Young candidates have seen fake listings, sudden layoffs, unanswered applications and midnight messages, so they no longer take a company’s word for it. They ask early because they have learned that waiting until after the offer can be expensive. Companies can respond in one of two ways. They can treat these questions as bad manners, or they can answer them honestly, with real openings, prompt replies and clear expectations about working hours. The second path costs very little, and it may earn the very trust that the first one loses.
The iced coffee is a distraction. The real story is a generation asking for the terms upfront, which is something the hiring process arguably should have offered all along.
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