In the job market, Gen Z is cooked

0:02Taylor Telford:Quick disclaimer for this episode. As you may notice, I'm not one of the usual hosts of Post Reports. I'm not Koby Ekowitz or Elahia Zahdi. I'm Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval, the audio intern. Now, I'm just one of 26 interns here at the Post, and there's about two days left of the internship program for most of us, which means there's one question on the top of our minds. Where will we find a job?

0:31Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Hi, I'm Jenny Crossland.

0:33Taylor Telford:Hi, I'm Ethan Beck. I'm the features intern for The Washington Post.

0:37Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:And I am the opinions copy desk intern for the summer 2025. It's tough going through all these job postings, seeing five plus years of experience required.

0:48Taylor Telford:So we are all part of Gen Z, and that means that we were born between 1997 and 2012. And right now is an incredibly difficult time for Gen Z to land a job. In July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate for 20 to 24-year-olds like me is now 7.9%. And that is a pretty big number. It's almost double the overall U.S. unemployment rate.

1:14Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:I think looking on LinkedIn can be very defeating, you know, in many ways. It can be an experience where you're like, I'm sort of suited for this job. I'm sort of suited for that job. Hmm, what do I do? Oh, and 500 people have applied for that job. I'm sort of suited for.

1:37Taylor Telford:From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. And as I mentioned, I'm Tadeo. It's Wednesday, August 13th. Today, I talk with business reporter Taylor Telforth about Gen Z and the workforce. What's the job landscape we're entering? Why is it so competitive? And will we ever be able to find a job?

2:07Taylor Telford:Hi, Taylor. How are you? Thank you for being here.

2:10Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Hey, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

2:12Taylor Telford:All right, Taylor. So here's the deal. I graduated from college back in May, and a lot of my friends are struggling to find work at the same time. So I'm wondering, what does the hiring landscape look like right now?

2:26Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Well, your timing is honestly pretty tough because it's basically one of the kind of toughest and most scarce hiring landscapes that we've seen since the Great Recession in 2008. And economists have made it clear to me that while there's never a good time to be an entry-level person, kind of trying to get somebody to, you know, take a gamble on you and your potential, that at the moment there is kind of a lot of economic pressure that is making it really, really tough for people to break in.

2:58Taylor Telford:What is happening? Why is it so hard to break in?

3:02Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:So there's kind of a collision of forces happening. There's political, economic, and kind of cultural changes that are all unfolding right as people are trying to get a job after the graduation season this year. And so on the one hand, we have an economy where basically since the pandemic, there's kind of just been a legacy of job cuts because a lot of companies expanded really, really fast and added too many roles. And ever since then, they've kind of been paring things back. Aside from the economic conditions where also there's been a lot of inflation and a lot of other things that are leading companies to basically make their budgets as tight as they can, the emergence of AI is also really shaking things up and particularly in entry level roles.

3:51Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:And at this point, there isn't a lot of outright replacement of jobs by AI. But what is happening is that AI is changing the way that things get done. And especially when it comes to roles that might have a lot of repetitive tasks or verification or things that can be systematized. Those are a lot of things that might be helpful for AI. And maybe you don't need, you know, you need one person where you might have needed to before. And so that is really kind of also adding just a lot of uncertainty for companies as they're trying to figure out just how to spread their resources around in this time and figuring out how to deploy AI.

4:32Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:A lot of them are also just kind of holding their cards close to their chest for the moment and kind of waiting to see how things unfold and just not making as many hiring decisions as they were in the past.

4:47Taylor Telford:yeah and like what fields are you seeing that are being most impacted by like the shift of

4:53Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:hiring decisions i think the area that we see some of the biggest whiplash is in technology i think that for many years now has been a field that's really attractive to young grads because it's been seen as really stable and high paying and with a lot of potential for advancement but But basically, with the legacy of some of the cuts that a lot of these companies are making, all of a sudden you have kind of much more experienced people that are competing for roles with folks who are just getting out. And they're having a really different experience trying to, you know, break into these places where all of a sudden there's a real kind of emphasis on expertise and specialization alongside the kind of development of AI as well.

5:36Taylor Telford:Yeah, because, gosh, like I'm thinking back to my own college experience. I was considering maybe doing computer science or finance because I thought that's where the money was, like where the job growth was. But now you're like saying that just hiring isn't what it used to be. Why is that? Like, why is that like so recent?

5:54Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Basically, when you look at the past several decades, I think that the kind of sign of success for a company was growth and expansion. And CEOs were constantly talking about, you know, the ability to add their headcount and, you know, pursue new projects. And I think that really since the pandemic, we have kind of seen, you know, the shift in teams trying to get leaner and especially to, along with the emergence of AI, a kind of greater focus on productivity. The past couple of years, you've had a lot of kind of tough love talk coming out of the C-suite, you know, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at Meta or Mark Benioff at Salesforce talking about the need for employees to do more with less.

6:38Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:And organizations are also trying to do the same thing. They're also trying to stretch their resources a lot further. And we really haven't seen this kind of cultural shift of praising, like keeping things this lean. And I think that in the past, the growth offered a lot of avenues for breaking into organizations and opportunities that might not be there for folks right now.

7:04Taylor Telford:The picture that you're painting, it's just a lot of hurdles that are really hard for Gen Z to overcome. And it really reminded me of the people that you talk to in your own stories. And I reached out to some of them. I got to call, for example, one of the sources that you interviewed for your story.

7:26Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Hi, I'm Maggie Chin. I graduated as a computer science major from UC Davis last year.

7:31Taylor Telford:She had crammed a lot of classes into her last semester at UC Davis. So she, like, didn't have any time at all to really look for jobs.

7:42Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:At that time, I didn't know anything about the job market situation. So I was just thinking, oh, like, once I graduate that summer, I'll just apply to a bunch of jobs and I'll be OK. And, like, I'll be able to find a job.

7:54Taylor Telford:And it turns out that it, well, it wouldn't be that easy.

7:59Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:I found that there weren't a lot of entry-level jobs available for me, because all the ones that I was finding was just like, you need at least one year of professional experience, or at least three years for just entry-level jobs. So it was hard to even find jobs to apply for. And then once I started applying for jobs, I was just not hearing anything back, which was really discouraging.

8:21Taylor Telford:And so Maggie kept searching and searching and searching for 11 months.

8:28Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:I got, it's sort of like a unpaid internship or a contractor role. They're not really like clear on the job specifications, but that was late May, early June.

8:47Taylor Telford:11 months just to get an unpaid internship, just to be able to show that she had experience on her resume. I mean, you spoke with Maggie too. Like, did this experience feel unusual?

8:59Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:The sad thing is it's not unusual at all at this point. Pretty much all of the kids that I spoke to were at least a year or two out of college and still mostly confronting opportunities like unpaid or paid internships as their best hope of kind of getting a foot in the door in their chosen fields.

9:19Taylor Telford:This is something that blows my mind, right? Because I went to college for four years and I was sold on the idea that the reason that you go there is so that you are a competitive candidate once you graduate. But it's looking quite different now. And I'm left to wonder, is having a college degree worth it anymore?

9:40Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:That is a really good question that I think a lot of people your age and older and younger are asking themselves. For many decades now, a lot of the investment in the American education system has been geared toward pushing people toward white-collar work with the kind of narrative being pushed that these are careers with opportunities for advancement and stability. But I think that what we're seeing right now is this moment where a lot of people are kind of reevaluating the utility in a world where the kind of stability of white collar jobs is looking, you know, a lot less stable than it's looked for the past several decades.

10:22Taylor Telford:My whole life, I never gave much thought to like technical schools or trade schools. And now I'm wondering if that looks different now. You know, if I was a high school student hearing this, I'd be wondering if I should just go for those options to look for a more stable job. Do you see those fields seeing an influx of students?

10:42Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:Yeah, there has been a huge reversal and kind of a tide of kids flowing into the trades, particularly in the past couple of years. It kind of started in the pandemic. and I think maybe some of that came from kind of the emphasis on you know essential workers and the recognition of the importance in their role in holding up the economy but I think that another thing that students have really been kind of connecting with in this landscape is just the opportunity to have more kind of independence to acquire the kind of skills that are associated with the trade that then allow you to be your own boss or start your own business and have more flexibility.

11:24Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:And I think you can see why that might be appealing as opposed to, you know, sending out a bunch of applications for, you know, a white collar job and not hearing anything back and wondering if you're even being seen by a person.

11:38Taylor Telford:Yeah, I mean, speaking of being seen by a real person, after the break, we'll talk more about AI in the labor market and how Gen Z is adapting. We'll be right back.

11:53Thank you.

12:22Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.

12:38Taylor Telford:So Taylor, I want to spend some time talking about artificial intelligence. We were just talking about how companies aren't expanding roles as much because of AI. And I brought this up to the opinion copyediting intern here at The Post, Ginny Crossland. Her job essentially is looking over stories and ensuring that they're grammatically correct.

13:01Tadeo Ruiz Sandoval:It's one of those jobs where it's very easy to kind of relegate it to the machines. Like, it seems like a pretty straightforward task of, oh, this is wrong and you change it.