Jahkini Bisselink
A quarter of the workforce now belongs to a generation that older leaders consistently describe as the hardest to read. Employers cannot retain them, marketers cannot reach them, and the standard explanations of what they want keep contradicting each other. Inside organisations, that gap is now a strategic problem: attrition, brand erosion, and decisions about culture made on assumptions no one in the room has tested.
Jahkini Bisselink is a Generation Z researcher and strategic foresight specialist at Whetston who helps organisations translate generational shift into workforce, customer, and culture decisions.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jahkini Bisselink
- She sits inside Whetston Strategic Foresight, a practice built for long-range corporate planning, which means her insights arrive as briefable strategy inputs rather than generational commentary.
- She is one of the few speakers who is both a member of Generation Z and a trained foresight researcher of it, which closes the gap between authentic voice and analytical distance.
- Her UN Youth Representative work involved structured consultations with more than 4,000 young people, giving her data depth most generational speakers cannot match.
- Senior clients including Deutsche Telekom, the European Parliament, and Lloyds Banking Group have used her to shape leadership conversations about Gen Z, not as a panel novelty.
- She works in English and Dutch, and she presents to boards, HR functions, and customer experience teams without translating the message between them.
Biography highlights
- Dutch United Nations Youth Representative, 2017 to 2019, elected through open national election.
- First UN General Assembly speech delivered at age 18.
- Youth expert at Whetston Strategic Foresight, Amsterdam, since 2020.
- TEDxYouth@Maastricht speaker, March 2019, “Why Youth Participation is Key”.
- Named in MIPAD (Most Influential People of African Descent) Class of 2023.
- Corporate clients include Deutsche Telekom, the European Parliament, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank, R/GA, and AVEVA.
Biography
A quarter of the workforce is now Generation Z, and most leadership teams are still describing them in language borrowed from coverage of millennials a decade earlier. The result is a steady mismatch between what organisations design for younger employees and customers, and what those groups actually want. Closing that gap is now a board-level problem, not an HR one.
Bisselink works inside Whetston Strategic Foresight in Amsterdam, where her job is to translate generational research into corporate strategy. Whetston is a foresight practice, not a marketing agency, which shapes how her work lands: she briefs leadership teams the way a strategy consultant would, with a defined argument and named implications, rather than offering generational colour.
Her credibility on Gen Z is built on two layers. She is a member of the generation, born in Amsterdam in 1999. She also spent two years as the Dutch United Nations Youth Representative, running structured consultations with more than 4,000 young people across the country and presenting their views at the UN General Assembly in New York. That fieldwork, conducted before she joined Whetston, is the data foundation under her current commercial work.
Boards and HR functions at Deutsche Telekom, Lloyds Banking Group, the European Parliament, and Rabobank have used her to pressure-test assumptions about how their next generation of employees and customers actually decide. She was recognised in the MIPAD Class of 2023 for the same body of work.
Key speaking topics
- Generation Z in the workforce
- The multigenerational workplace
- Future of customer experience
- Strategic foresight and generational trends
- Corporate purpose and youth activism
- Talent attraction and retention for the next generation
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of talent rebuilding attraction and retention strategies around a Gen Z-majority workforce
- CMOs and customer experience leaders whose growth segment is now Gen Z
- Executive teams and boards reviewing workforce, culture, and brand strategy through a generational lens
- Public sector and policy bodies that need a credible Gen Z voice in stakeholder conversations
Audience outcomes
- A clearer read on what Gen Z employees and customers actually decide on, separated from common media generalisations.
- Specific implications for how attraction, retention, and customer strategy need to change inside the audience’s own organisation.
- A working understanding of the friction points between four working generations and where leaders are still managing on outdated assumptions.
- Direct exposure to a Gen Z researcher whose evidence base is consultation work, not commentary.
Talks
A leadership session on how four generations now share the workplace and where the friction is actually located.
Key takeaways:
- How Gen Z reads authority, feedback, and progression differently from preceding generations.
- The specific management practices that are quietly driving Gen Z attrition.
- What leaders need to change in how they communicate, not just what they communicate.
A customer strategy session on Gen Z as a consumer segment and what that means for brand, product, and CX design.
Key takeaways:
- How Gen Z purchase behaviour diverges from millennial assumptions still baked into many brand strategies.
- What corporate purpose has to look like to register as credible with Gen Z buyers.
- Where customer experience design needs to be rebuilt for a generation that researches before it engages.
A session on corporate purpose, employee voice, and the consumer-activist overlap inside Gen Z.
Key takeaways:
- The shift from CSR communications to operational expectations of corporate behaviour.
- How Gen Z employees and customers test corporate claims, and what they reward.
- Where the biggest reputational risk now sits for organisations whose stated values do not match operating reality.
An HR-focused session on building an employer offer Gen Z will accept and stay inside.
Key takeaways:
- What Gen Z candidates evaluate before they apply, and where most employer brands fail the test.
- The retention levers that work, separated from the ones that perform well in surveys but not in practice.
- How to redesign onboarding, management, and progression for the first generation that will not tolerate the old defaults.