Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI assumed it wouldn\u2019t be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been \u2018carefully reviewed\u2019. About 70% of jobs I didn\u2019t hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thousands of people are applying for the same jobs now<\/p>\n
AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. \u201cThousands of people are applying to the same jobs now \u2013 on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under \u00a330k, \u201cwhich isn\u2019t that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax\u201d.<\/p>\n
Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history.<\/p>\n
As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs<\/a>, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT<\/a>. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country.<\/p>\n Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master\u2019s degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May.<\/p>\n Martyna, 23, feels disappointed by the lack of graduate opportunities she has encountered since leaving university<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve applied to about 150 entry-level jobs \u2013 in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,\u201d she said. \u201cSo far I\u2019ve had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream.<\/p>\n \u201cPlatforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they\u2019re looking for. It feels dystopian.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. \u201cI feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,\u201d Martyna said. \u201cBoth of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have \u00a390,000 in student debt \u2013 for what?<\/p>\n \u201cThey told us: \u2018If you don\u2019t go to university, you could be working in McDonald\u2019s.\u2019 I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree.<\/p>\n \u201cJobs don\u2019t care if you have a degree,\u201d said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a degree in visual communication and can\u2019t get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I\u2019m frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I\u2019m finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.\u201d<\/p>\n Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. \u201cIt\u2019s the best I could get,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI.<\/p>\n \u201c[I\u2019ve read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don\u2019t know how to filter them,\u201d Schurer said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.\u201d<\/p>\n It appears that it\u2019s back to who you know rather than what you know \u2013 thanks to AI<\/p>\n Her older son, she said, had spent a \u201csoul-destroying\u201d five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections.<\/p>\n \u201cIt appears that it\u2019s back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,\u201d she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents.<\/p>\n \u201cAI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one\u2019s success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,\u201d agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. \u201cBut gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.\u201d<\/p>\n The job market his students were graduating into was \u201ctough, and about to get tougher\u201d, he predicted.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,\u201d said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. \u201cNow, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve.<\/p>\n \u201cCoupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.\u201d<\/p>\n Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat people want to do and what they\u2019re actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,\u201d said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England.<\/p>\n \u201cBut sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning \u00a3700-\u00a3800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since.<\/p>\n Sanjay, 26, is struggling to find his first full-time job<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications \u2013 in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was \u201cno-brainer\u201d that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.\u201d<\/p>\n I just want to use my degree<\/p>\n While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality.<\/p>\n \u201cMy biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,\u201d said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master\u2019s in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications.<\/p>\n \u201cThe job I\u2019ve been offered is not using the skills I have,\u201d she said. \u201cI just want to use my degree.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[64,63,99,180],"class_list":{"0":"post-42004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}