PantherNOW Editorial Board
When you log onto LinkedIn nowadays, you’re flooded by thousands of job postings. Unfortunately, even if you apply to every single one of them, the chance you’ll be offered an interview is scant at best.
Following that logic, the chance of actually finding a job is even thinner. It’s become a fact of life now that it is nigh-impossible for recent graduates to find jobs.
This isn’t just anecdotal frustration. The entry-level job market has quietly hollowed out following the post-COVID hiring boom. Only 30% of graduates have been able to secure work in their field post-graduation.
Roles labeled “junior” or “associate” now ask for years of experience; not to mention algorithms decide now whether a resume is even seen, let alone read by a human being.
Less-overtly vocational roles such as the humanities have seen the greatest hits to employment. These roles often lack clear pipelines into stable employment, making an already narrow, generalist path even more difficult to navigate.
Mass applications by job seekers using AI to spam their resumes doesn’t help either.
Candidates increasingly use AI tools to flood postings with resumes, further diluting the applicant pool and intensifying competition as demand continues to shrink while supply only goes up.
While Handshake and other platforms are useful vectors for employment on paper, they often contain expired or filled job posts, leaving students wondering what’s even the point. As a result, connections and referrals have become the most salient methods to find roles.
Without internships or a robust network of 500+ connections on LinkedIn, breaking into the labor market can feel like an uphill battle most of if not all the time.
As students, we need to push for better preparation on campus. Chiefly, staying realistic about our chances as young professionals and pushing for universities to streamline the hiring process with more specialized job fairs and campus-exclusive recruitment pipelines.
Otherwise, the alternative is hundreds of graduates every semester wondering when their lives are going to begin.
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