Alex Atherton

Alex Atherton taught the people your organization is now trying to hire, which is a different qualification from having surveyed them.

He spent twenty-five years in education, most of it as a secondary school headteacher in large inner-London comprehensives, running schools full of the cohort employers now describe as difficult to recruit, difficult to retain and difficult to motivate. He heard them called snowflakes often enough, by people who had never met them, to write a book with that title.

The Snowflake Myth argues that most of what employers believe about this generation is a description of being young rather than a description of a generation, and that the parts which are genuinely new, mainly what constant connectivity and a decade of institutional instability did to expectations of work, are not the parts being complained about. That distinction is the practical value of the session: it separates the grievances an employer should ignore from the ones that are actually costing them hires.

He now speaks on recruiting and retaining Gen Z talent, leading a workplace with several generations in it, and the behavior and mindset behind decisions employers find baffling. He has worked across financial services, local government, human resources, learning and development, agriculture, construction, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and education, and each talk is built around the specific problem the organization brought rather than delivered from a fixed deck.

He is the right booking where the complaint is concrete: a graduate scheme losing people in the first year, a frontline workforce that cannot be staffed, or a management layer that has stopped trying to understand its youngest reports. He is based in the United Kingdom and travels internationally.