As other CEOs pause entry-level hiring, this AI founder is recruiting inexperienced Gen Z talent.

(SeaPRwire) –   Gen Z just can’t catch a break. They’re grappling with widespread unemployment as entry-level roles disappear. Roughly 40% of business leaders have acknowledged they plan to hire even fewer college graduates this year, since AI can perform the same work for less cost, leading them to retain only senior, experienced staff instead. But at one AI firm, the less professional experience you have, the better off you are.

Alon Chen, founder and chief executive officer of Tastewise—a generative AI platform trusted by PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Mars—is actively seeking Gen Z candidates with no prior work experience and no formal degree required. And he has a very specific rationale for this choice.

“There are certain roles where you actually want people who don’t hold biases or rely on outdated work practices,” Chen tells . “because those old ways just aren’t relevant anymore.”

Over the past several years, AI has sparked an explosion of new tools, job functions, and work methodologies—and in his view, younger employees are the ideal group to leverage these developments.

“I’m hiring entry-level candidates because they don’t have fixed boundaries or constraints on how they perceive the world. They’re practically AI natives, having grown up immersed in this new landscape of opportunities. And I’ve seen some of the strongest ideas come from this younger generation that hasn’t yet entered the formal job market.”

Does greater experience matter less in this new AI-driven era?

Chen has plenty of experience betting on unorthodox talent. At just 15 years old, Chen launched his first business, selling computers to thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises across Israel.

He took on the role of CMO at Google at age 28, despite having no marketing degree—and went on to build the $2 billion Google Partners product line. He later left to found Tastewise, which has raised $71.6 million and now partners with over half of the world’s top 100 food and beverage companies. Chen is fully invested in this venture, and he’s actively hiring.

And in an era defined by rapid AI advancements, he says experience is no longer the valuable commodity it once was.

“The traditional playbook is obsolete today, since there are countless new approaches to complete the exact same tasks,” he elaborates.

The more thoroughly someone has mastered traditional methods for a task, the harder it is to get them to look beyond those established practices. Chen doesn’t face that issue with a 22-year-old who has never been taught a specific way of working.

“When you join a team as someone who simply identifies a problem and seeks the best possible solution,” Chen explains, “that can sometimes be preferable to a candidate who has held the same role for years and only tries to replicate what worked for them previously.”

To be clear: Chen isn’t only hiring Gen Z candidates. For research and development roles, he still prioritizes experienced professionals. But within certain departments, such as customer insights—where team members help clients maximize the value of Tastewise’s AI platform—he would much rather hire someone who has never performed the role before.

And these entry-level hires aren’t just temporary positions—finish the role and move on, that’s not the case here. Chen says they are becoming “pivotal” members of the company, able to move seamlessly between technology, business, and client-facing work in ways that more siloed senior staff simply cannot.

Other CEOs also favor hiring ‘less biased’ Gen Z candidates

Chen isn’t the only executive who holds this viewpoint. Ricardo Amper, founder and CEO of $1.25 billion AI firm Incode Technologies, has made the same strategic choice—and expressed his thoughts even more bluntly. “My belief is that approaching problems with a fresh mind and first principles is important. That’s why young people are particularly helpful in tech, because they’re less biased,” he previously stated. “I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased.”

Despite facing criticism for being lazy—with claims ranging from arriving late to work, ghosting job interviews, to refusing unpaid overtime—the $62 billion consumer conglomerate Colgate-Palmolive doesn’t subscribe to this negative stereotype. Chief Human Resources Officer Sally Massey previously told that young digital natives bring “new ideas, new perspectives, curiosity… They’re pushing us to get better and to do things differently—I think it’s great.”

Steven Bartlett, founder and host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, took this approach even further—hiring a candidate whose resume was literally two lines long, with zero formal experience, after she thanked the security guard by name on the way into her interview. Six months later, she had become one of the best hires he’d ever made.

And Matt Huang, cofounder of the $12 billion cryptocurrency firm Paradigm, is so convinced by his youngest hires that he’s been promoting them into the C-suite. His first hire in 2018 was Charlie Noyes, a 19-year-old MIT dropout who walked into his first 10 a.m. meeting five hours late. By 2025, before the crypto company was exited, he was a general partner at just 25.

“They sometimes create an insane amount of chaos, and you’ll want to pull your hair out,” Huang noted of Gen Z hires. “But then you see what they’re capable of, and it’s like, holy cow, nobody else on the planet could do that.”

For Chen, the message to Gen Z job seekers is simple: the door is open. You just have to be worth letting in.

“I would arrive at a job interview with a portfolio showcasing the work I’ve completed and the results I’ve delivered,” he says. “Execution is everything.”

“I truly think there is a real opportunity for younger candidates,” he adds, “if they are resourceful and can find a way to demonstrate that they’re stronger than other applicants, and more driven to succeed.”