The great graduate job drought

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0:24Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, February 20th. And this is your FT News Briefing. We've got a special show for you today. Today, we're going to figure out just how bad the job market is for new graduates and what a CEO of a hiring platform has to say about it. It's easier than ever to apply for jobs. It's harder and harder to get a job. And they're not hearing back as much along the way. But first, an update on the Middle East. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

1:02All eyes are on the U.S. and Iran. President Donald Trump said yesterday that he will decide in the next 10 days whether America will strike the country or make a deal. Trump has been threatening to attack Iran since it brutally cracked down on anti-regime protests last month. That crackdown killed thousands of people. Also at issue is Iran's nuclear program. The Trump administration has held indirect talks with Tehran about it recently. The U.S. has been sending military resources to the region over the past several days. This is one of the biggest buildups in the area since America's 2003 invasion of Iraq.

1:36American military officials have said that the strike could come as early as this weekend if Trump orders it. Oil markets are volatile because of all this. The price of Brent crude hit a six-month high on Thursday and has been trading above$70 a barrel.

1:55Finding a job out of college is getting harder. The unemployment rate for recent graduates is climbing faster than the rest of the population. That's according to U.S. Census Bureau data. But that's also playing out all over the world. Honestly, navigating the job market right now has been tougher than I expected. We asked FTNB listeners for their experiences in the job market, and we're going to put their experiences to Anjali Raval, the FT's management editor. Hi, Anjali. Hi. So I'm going to play you some more of this first voice memo that we got. It's from a person named Hannah. She graduated from King's College with a degree in war studies and international relations.

2:31I've applied widely. I've done the internships, the research, the volunteering. But like a lot of graduates, I'm finding that getting that first proper role is the hardest step. Does her experience sound familiar to you? Is it similar to other experiences? Yes, it really is. When I reported my piece about the graduate job market, I heard from so many graduates and so many people who knew graduates too, just about the slog. They are doing dozens of applications. They are almost finding like they're hitting a wall at every turn. And what they're finding is that they're almost sending these applications into the void.

3:15They don't hear back. They're ghosted. It's so tragic for a lot of these graduates because they've applied so many times that they almost feel that they're completely ground down in the process. And so much of the process itself is what's part of the problem. Tell me a little bit more about that. Why is that such a problem? Now with the rising use of AI, it often means that for a lot of the biggest companies, They are screening applications through AI tools first. So the candidates themselves find that they have to then tailor their CVs and their covering letters to algorithms trained to detect keywords.

3:59It's this slightly bizarre way of applying. You know, one graduate told me that she spends so much of her time trying to make her applications more scannable. But even when she feels like she's done the best, most polished version of her application, she may just never hear anything back. And it's tough for the parties on the other side that are accepting the applications because actually the graduates themselves are using AI. It's a slightly bizarre system where now you have people in HR having to comb through just hundreds, maybe even thousands more applications than they ever would have had to even like a year or two ago.

4:41And so the competition is just so great. I want to play another voice memo that we got. This is from a listener named Yasmin. It's been quite hard and stressful to find a junior position in finance right now. I'm mainly applying through banks career websites, trying to network with finance professionals on LinkedIn and also staying flexible about rules and timelines. What are young graduates doing like the one that we just heard from to help increase their chances of landing a gig? Aside from just scouring every job platform and recruitment website they can think of, they're also looking at other means.

5:27You know, in my reporting, I found that they were turning to outfits that might be trying to help them in terms of coaching them through the application and recruitment process. But actually, there's something a bit more sinister also happening, which is that there are a range of businesses targeting these job-seeking graduates that have proliferated over the last couple of years. And lots of people complain that, in fact, they're being exploited at a vulnerable time. And actually, this is particularly true of banking and financial services. I spoke to one graduate who said that the company that they got in touch with, they were suggesting that he pay a fee of close to£6 ,000 a month.

6:10What are the long-term consequences of this trend? So there's a few things that I would say. I mean, the first thing is that when you are any graduate that enters into a poor jobs market, suffers many years on, even decades later, in terms of their salaries. You saw that with people who entered the workforce during the global financial crisis. you're almost viewed differently by potential employers and psychologically this obviously does affect you you know the more months go by the less confidence you probably have and less hope you have about finding a job or you may start somewhere where you just never imagined you would be you might be in a completely different industry or in a much much more junior job because what's happening at the moment is that much more experienced people, maybe with two or three years in the workforce, are applying for junior jobs that maybe would have gone to a graduate five years ago.

7:11The fact is, you've got somebody with three years worth of experience under their belt. For the employer, it's a no-brainer situation. But who's losing out? It's going to be the entry-level worker, whether it be a graduate or non-graduate. That's the FT's management editor, Anjali Raval. Thanks so much, Anjali. Thank you.

7:35And we just heard what things are looking like for job seekers from their perspective. The TLDR is that it's rough out there. But what can we learn from the people doing the hiring? Here with me to get that perspective is Daniel Chait. He's the CEO and co-founder of Greenhouse, which is an applicant tracking software and hiring platform. Hi, Daniel. Thanks for joining me in studio. Hey, great to be here. So, Daniel, for folks who have not used Greenhouse before, tell me, what exactly does it do? Yeah, so if you've ever applied to a job, you've probably gone to a company's website and looked for a job listing that you're interested in, filled in your name, and maybe retyped your LinkedIn profile again and hit submit.

8:08That information all goes somewhere. Well, it turns out that when you hire someone at a company, a whole bunch of work has to happen in order to make that hire. You have to think about what the job description is. You have to agree on, like, the salary, and you have to talk about who's going to do the interviews and what are they going to ask. And then, of course, you have to process thousands of candidates and ultimately make an offer and a hire. All that work happens collaboratively in Greenhouse. So we're the sort of internal hiring platform that companies use to run all of their hiring. We actually use Greenhouse for our hiring process.

8:37I think a lot of our team has actually been hired through Greenhouse. I think one thing that I want to zone in a little bit on, Daniel, is a LinkedIn report found that global hiring is 20 % below pre-pandemic levels. Given that Greenhouse is used by so many companies, have you noticed a slowdown in applicants recently? Yeah, well, we've noticed a few different things happening in the job market, and none of them great. Greenhouse processed last quarter about 65 million job applications across all of our customers. Wow. So there's lots of job-seeking activity that we see, and we see what happens in the hiring funnels and things like that.

9:12And similar to what you've seen elsewhere, we've definitely seen a drop in hiring activity. But the other thing that you may not see as a job seeker is at the same time as that's happening, companies are under a huge amount of pressure to do more with less. Their own teams, in particular their own recruiting teams, are often shrinking and suffering from budget cuts. And so the number of applications per recruiter has gone up even faster. And what that means for you, the job seeker, is if you're applying to a job, somebody's got to be going through that pile of resumes. That person's pile is about three and a half times bigger than it was in 2022.

9:45Which slows it down considerably. Which slows it down and makes it less likely that you're going to hear back. Do you have a sense of how this kind of fatigue and frustration plays into the hiring process or the application process? Does it mean that people are applying to fewer jobs or maybe they're less inclined to try for jobs that might be considered out of their grasp? Well, I think people are trying everything. So, no, I don't think they're giving up. I think, you know, if anything, they're doubling down. We read the comments. We look at the data. And you see these very clear patterns. People are trying to get a job.

10:18It's easier than ever to apply for jobs. it's harder and harder to get a job, and they're not hearing back as much along the way. So they're just left feeling like, is it me? Is the system maybe biased against me? Or is there some secret power controlling this whole thing that's preventing me from getting a job? People look for a story to tell themselves as to why they're not getting there because the fact is that they're largely not. Are there candidates that are performing better than others? I mean, is there a way for someone to maybe stand out more through their resume or through their application that gets more hits?

10:51Yeah, there are things that you can do. So first thing is our data show that being early to apply for a job gives you a distinct advantage. If you're in the first few hours of a job being opened, you're much more likely to be looked at and therefore much more likely to proceed in and get hired. Because what happens from the company standpoint, they open up a job, they'll sometimes get hundreds or even thousands of applicants within just a couple days. And speaking as a hiring manager, I do tend to prioritize the people who get in early versus the ones who get in late. I mean, people just – that's just human nature.

11:22I think the other thing is you hear a lot of myths out there about what people can do to game the system. You heard for a while a lot about people putting secret keywords in like white text on a white background and try to trick the computers. Is that right? I never heard that. Yeah. It's like, oh, like people – again, people are trying to figure out the story that they're not being told. And so it's like, well, maybe that will work for me. But things like that generally don't work. That's generally not how the system works on the back end. But what does work is make sure that your resume very clearly tells the story, not just a listing chronologically of, like, the job titles you've had, but the impact that you've had, the responsibilities that you had, and sort of what that meant to the business.

11:57So if you drove revenue increases, if you helped launch a new product, if you serviced a bunch of customers that became happy, like, whatever it is you did in your job, make sure not to just talk about what your title was but about the impact that you had. And then I think the third thing is good old-fashioned networking still works. And I know it's difficult to say and it's not accessible equally to everyone, but if you have the opportunity to try to go to industry events or make connections with people that ultimately work at those companies, that's definitely going to help you as well. That's Daniel Chait.

12:28He's the CEO and co-founder of the hiring platform, Greenhouse. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. You can hear a longer version of my chat with Daniel tomorrow in the news briefing feed where we talk about tips for hiring managers, some unethical uses of AI in hiring, and whether or not this job market is worse than 2008. Just want to say a big thank you to everyone who sent in their job application stories. We really appreciate it.

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