Job Hunting. Yeah, About That …
August 4, 2025
It seems we older generations should think twice before criticizing younger adults’ employment status. MSN reports, ‘Gen Z Is Right About the Job Hunt—It Really Is Worse than It Was for Millennials, with Nearly 60% of Fresh-Faced Grads Frozen Out of the Workforce.’ A recent study from Kickresume shows that, while just 25% of millennials and Gen X graduates had trouble finding work right out of college, that figure is now at a whopping 58%. The tighter job market means young job-seekers must jump through hoops we elders would not recognize. Reporter Emma Burleigh observes:
“It’s no secret that landing a job in today’s labor market requires more than a fine-tuned résumé and cover letter. Employers are putting new hires through bizarre lunch tests and personality quizzes to even consider them for a role.”
To make matters worse, these demeaning tests are only for those whose applications have passed an opaque, human-free AI review process. Does that mean issues of racial, gender, age, and socio-economic biases in AI have been solved? Of course not. But companies are forging ahead with the tools anyway. In fact, companies jumping on the AI train may be responsible for narrowing the job market in the first place. Gee, who could have guessed? The write-up continues:
“It’s undeniably a tough job market for many white-collar workers—about 20% of job-seekers have been searching for work for at least 10 to 12 months, and last year around 40% of unemployed people said they didn’t land a single job interview in 2024. It’s become so bad that hunting for a role has become a nine-to-five gig for many, as the strategy has become a numbers game—with young professionals sending in as many as 1,700 applications to no avail. And with the advent of AI, the hiring process has become an all-out tech battle between managers and applicants. Part of this issue may stem from technology whittling down the number of entry-level roles for Gen Z graduates; as chatbots and AI agents take over junior staffers’ mundane job tasks, companies need fewer staffers to meet their goals.”
Some job seekers are turning to novel approaches. We learn of one who slipped his resume into Silicon Valley firms by tucking it inside boxes of doughnuts. How many companies he approached is not revealed, but we are told he got at least 10 interviews that way. Then there is the German graduate who got her CV in front of a few dozen marketing executives by volunteering to bus tables at a prominent sales event. Shortly thereafter, she landed a job at LinkedIn.
Such imaginative tactics may reflect well on those going into marketing, but they may be less effective in other fields. And it should not take extreme measures like these, or sending out thousands of resumes, to launch one’s livelihood. Soldiering through higher education, often with overwhelming debt, is supposed to be enough. Or it was for us elders. Now, writes Burleigh:
“The age-old promise that a college degree will funnel new graduates into full-time roles has been broken. ‘Universities aren’t deliberately setting students up to fail, but the system is failing to deliver on its implicit promise,’ Lewis Maleh, CEO of staffing and recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, told Fortune.”
So let us cut the young folks in our lives some slack. And, if we can, help them land a job. After all, this may be required if we are to have any hope of getting grandchildren or great-niblings.
Cynthia Murrell, August 4, 2025
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