Mike Hege, a realtor at Pridemore Properties in North Carolina, asked his 27-year-old video marketing manager to edit some footage for his Instagram and TikTok. What came back wasn't what he expected—and that's exactly why it worked.
Instead of a polished highlight reel, the Gen Z employee delivered a four-minute compilation of Hege doing the thing most people do in front of a camera: taking long, uncomfortable pauses. Inhales. Hair adjustments. The kind of tics you edit out. She didn't. She leaned into them, turning every awkward breath into the punchline.
The video hit Instagram with a caption: "Asked my Gen Z employee to edit a video for me, and this is what I got." It landed differently than intended. Over 4 million likes later, viewers were asking the same question: "Give her a raise because this 100% caught my attention far more than whatever you were going to say."
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Start Your News DetoxHege's company had been chasing "authenticity" and "humanity" on social media—the kind of thing brands spend thousands on consultants to manufacture. His employee just... did it. By refusing to hide the real, awkward, human parts, she made the video memorable in a way a polished take never would have been. Hege told TODAY she'd been "crushing it" since she started. A raise seemed fair.
This wasn't an isolated moment. Goodwill of North Georgia posted a video where an employee deliberately left in a flub the presenter wanted cut. The Poe Museum dropped a quirky piece about their "wide variety of chairs." There's a pattern emerging: Gen Z workers aren't just accepting the messy reality of content creation—they're weaponizing it.
It's a small shift, but it matters. For years, social media demanded perfection: the right angle, the right lighting, the right number of takes. Gen Z is flipping that script. They grew up watching influencers, TikTokers, and YouTubers build massive audiences by being deliberately imperfect. They know that "real" often beats "polished" by a mile.
For a realtor in North Carolina, that insight turned a routine work video into something people actually wanted to watch. For the employee, it turned a regular Tuesday into proof that sometimes the best creative work isn't about hiding who you are—it's about leaning into it.
