The great graduate job drought

Today's markets move fast. Get the insights you need in 10 minutes with the Barclays Brief, a new podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. Through sharp dialogue and scenario-based analysis, our leading experts analyze key market themes each week. So, whether you're managing a portfolio or leading a business, the Barclays Brief Podcast can help you make smarter decisions today. Stay sharp, stay briefed. Find Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcast.

Hi folks, I know things at the FT News briefing have looked a little different lately. You could say that it's been a whole new world, but when you sit down with your mug of coffee or tea on Monday, things might look more like they used to. Yep, that's right. We're switching to a revamped version of our original logo. Hope you like our new old look.

Good 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. We're gonna 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. All eyes are on the US and Iran. President Donald Trump said yesterday that he will decide in the next ten 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 US 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 two thousand three invasion of Iraq. American 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.

Finding 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 US Census Bureau data. But that's also playing out all over the world. Honestly, navigating the job markets 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 Angela Rival, the FT's management editor. Hi Angeli. Hi.

So I'm gonna 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. I'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 w what they're finding is that they're almost sending these applications into the void. They 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've almost feel like they're completely ground down in the process. And so much of the process itself is what 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 C Vs and their covering letters to algorithms trained to detect keywords. it'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 like 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 this 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. And so the competition is just so great. I wanna 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 bank's 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. You 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 and it's 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 six thousand pounds a month.

What 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 jobs m 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. The fact is you've got somebody with three years worth of experience under their belt. For 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, Angeli Raval. Thanks so much, Angie. Thank you.

And 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. That'll information all goes somewhere. Well it turns out that when you hire someone at a company,

whole bunch of work has to happen in order to make that higher. 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. Uh we actually use greenhouse for our hiring process. I think A lot of our team has actually been hired through greenhouse. Um I think one thing that I wanna zone in a little bit on it, Daniel, is that a LinkedIn report found that global hiring is twenty percent 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 sixty five 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. And 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 and particularly 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 gotta be going through that pile of resumes. That person's pile is about three and a half times bigger than it was in twenty twenty two. Which slows it down considerably. Which slows it down and makes it less likely that you're gonna 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 l fewer jobs or maybe they're less inclined to uh 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 um 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, 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. So they're just left feeling like, is it me? Is the system maybe biased against me? Or is there some secret

you know, power controlling this whole thing that's like preventing me from getting a job. Like people look for a story to tell themselves as to why they're not getting where the fact is that they're largely not. Are there candidates that are performing better than others? I mean i is there a way for

Someone to maybe stand out more through their resume or through their application that gets more hits? Yeah, 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 of days.

Speaking as a hiring manager, I 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 that's just human that's human nature. Yeah. I think the other thing is, you know, 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 and like white text on a white background and try to trick the computer. 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'll 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. So if you drove revenue increases, if you helped you, uh launch a new product if you serviced a bunch of customers that became happy, like whatever it is in you 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. 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, like that's definitely gonna help you as well. It's Daniel Chait. He'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 and hiring, and whether or not this job market is worse than two thousand eight. want to say a big thank you to everyone who sent in their job application stories. We really appreciate it.

Before we go, let me ask you something. Why do you love the FT? Is it the pink paper? Is it the British accents? Or do you, like me, love the fact that we don't just tell you what's going on, but really drill down to the why of a story? If that's the case, you can now get our coverage through a discounted digital subscription. Just go to ft.com/slash briefing sale. Go ahead and find that link in the show notes.

This has been your daily FT News briefing. Check back next week for the latest business news. The FT News briefing was produced this week by Henry Larson, Misha Franco Louval, Just Gabriel Doyle, Sonia Hudson, Fiona Simon, and Victoria Craig. I'm your host and editor, Mark Filipino. Our show is mixed by Alex Higgins, Kent Millitzer, and Kelly Gary. We had helped this week from Peter Barber, Michael Lelo, David DeSilva, and Gavin Coleman. Our executive producer is Topher Forges.

The FT's global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley, and our theme song is by Metaphor Music. You think? We've got it. The Drop by GNC, bringing you all the newness that matters, handpicked by the pros who actually know what's up and what's proven to work. We keep you on top of the trends and dialed into what's next, whether you're crushing it at the gym.

leveling up your game, or thriving every day. The Drop by GNC is where the latest solutions in health and wellness land first. Nonstop innovation and Fresh Finds Daily. Explore what's new and what's next on The Drop by GNC. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching?

Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at Schwab.com slash Washingtonwise.