Talking to coworkers you don’t know very well, or may have little in common with outside of work, can be uncomfortable. But no generation seems more averse to making office chit-chat than Gen Z. Now, one company is offering a new role for a brave Gen Zer to challenge all that.
The job, called a chief small talk officer, was recently posted by the self-improvement app RiseGuide. The company is looking for up to three candidates, ideally based in New York or Los Angeles, but anyone in the U.S. can apply. The role offers $2,000 for 30 days of talking to strangers—and even includes a going-out budget.
According to the post, the CSTO “will visit a different spot in their city: cafés, bookstores, sports clubs, cocktail bars, parks, community spaces—you name it. There, they start a conversation with a stranger (or several).” Anyone of any generation can apply.
Talking is the hard part. The rest of the role’s responsibilities include documenting the employee’s experience for the company in the form of “notes, observations, short videos, and stories.”
Those findings will be used to put together a ranking of the best places to meet strangers in cities across the country, tips for those who want to get better at talking to strangers, as well as a full lesson that will appear on the RiseGuide app.
The job may be offbeat, but it’s also timely. According to the company’s own research, only 34% of people would talk to a stranger. But for Gen Z, the stats seem even more dismal: A 2024 Harris Poll study conducted for Fortune found that Gen Z is struggling with how to talk to their coworkers, as 53% of hiring managers said Gen Z graduates have poor communication skills.
Even more staggering, 65% of Gen Z workers admitted they simply have no idea what to say to their colleagues.
Anastasia Sliusarenko, brand and reputation manager at RiseGuide, who helped develop the idea for the role, tells Fast Company that around 44% of Gen Z are on their phones for six or more hours every day. Therefore, learning to talk to people is essential for the generation who “never actually learned” to communicate face-to-face.
Sliusarenko explains the company wants to test whether “communication and confidence are trainable skills, not personality traits. And in 2026, these are essential: from workplace visibility and better career prospects to quality relationships and reducing the loneliness epidemic.”
While making small talk might not be as easy as it sounds, the role is certainly a pretty interesting resume builder. It’s also easy to apply. The company advises interested applicants to send a self-presentation pitch video through the link in the application form. (Resumes are optional because this gig is all about talking.)
Whether that’s a dream come true or a total nightmare will likely be up to the candidate’s own opinion and conditioning around small talk. But either way, it’ll be a role that could make a big impact on developing skills that could last a lifetime. At the very least, it could give a lucky Gen Zer something to chat about at cocktail parties.
