Jessica Buchsbaum first noticed that something had changed in May 2008.

The head of recruitment for a law firm in Florida, Buchsbaum was used to interviewing young candidates for summer internships who seemed to think the world owed them a living. Many applicants expected the firm to promote itself to them rather than the other way around.

However, last May's crop were far more humble. "The tone had changed from 'What can you do for me?' to 'Here's what I can do for you,' " she says.

The global downturn has been a brutal awakening for the youngest members of the work force — variously dubbed "Millennials," "Generation Y" or the "Net Generation" by social researchers. Net Geners are, roughly, people born in the 1980s and 1990s.

Those old enough to have passed from school and university into work had become used to a world in which jobs were plentiful and firms fell over one another to recruit them. Now their prospects are grimmer.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among people in their 20s increased significantly in the two most recent recessions. It is likely to do so again as industries such as finance and technology, which employ lots of young people, ax thousands of jobs.

This is creating new problems for managers. Because of the downturn, Net Geners are finding it harder to hop to new jobs. At the same time, their dissatisfaction is growing as crisis-hit firms adopt more of a command-and-control approach to management — the antithesis of the open, collaborative style young workers prefer.

Less autonomy and more directives have sparked complaints among Net Geners that offices and factories have become "pressure cookers" and "boiler rooms."

Such griping may reinforce the stereotype of young workers as being afraid of hard work — more American Idle than American Idol.

Yet a survey of 4,200 young graduates from 44 countries published in December by PricewaterhouseCoopers found they want many of the same things as previous generations, including long tenure with a small number of employers. And they are willing to put in the hours to get them, if they are treated well.

Indeed, Net Geners may be just the kind of employees that companies need to help them deal with the recession's hazards. For one thing, they are accomplished at juggling many tasks at once. For another, they are often eager to move to new roles at the drop of a hat. Such flexibility can be a boon in difficult times.

Net Geners' knowledge of Internet technology can also help companies save money. Consider the case of Best Buy, a big consumer-electronics retailer. Keen to create a new employee portal, the firm contacted a consultant that quoted it a price of several million dollars.

Shocked by this, a group of young Best Buy employees put together a small team of developers from their own networks who produced a new portal for about $250,000.

Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy's Web site for fun in seven days in his spare time.

Best Buy, which announced in December that its third-quarter profit had fallen by 77 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, is also betting that its Net Geners can come up with new ways of boosting sales using the Web and other means.

"We'll weather the storm and be stronger because of the Net Generation," says Michele Azar, Best Buy's head of Internet strategy.