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Noelle King
Something very strange is happening in the entry level job market, especially for recent college grads who are looking for white collar jobs. There are these stories about people applying to dozens and dozens of jobs.
Nicole Hefty
After graduation, I applied to at least 80 to 100 different jobs. A majority of those jobs haven't bothered in following up or contacting me to schedule an interview.
Noelle King
Never hearing anything back.
Nicole Hefty
It's just a nightmare. Like everything's done with computers now. No one wants to talk to each other and I'm literally having to like stalk people online and I hate doing it. But how is my supposed to get in contact with you? And the only way that I can get in contact with your whole company is by talking to a chatbot on.
Noelle King
Your website and wondering what, if anything, AI's got to do with it.
Nicole Hefty
But I also wonder, am I just writing something for one AI to talk to another AI?
Noelle King
Ahead on TODAY Explained from Vox why you're having so much trouble getting an entry level job.
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Lindsay Ellis
You'Re listening to TODAY Explained.
Colton Massey
I'm Colton Massey. I'm a recent grad with a degree in software engineering.
Noelle King
What year?
Colton Massey
2025.
Noelle King
If anyone should be able to nab an entry level job, it should be Colton Massie. He Went to college, fixated on graduating with a useful degree so that he would never run the risk of being unemploy. This is a fixation which goes all the way back to when he was a kid growing up in New Jersey, but really actually growing up on a computer.
Colton Massey
When I was 13, I was online all the time. I didn't really have hobbies outside of the recreational cross I was doing. So I was really just like on social media, mostly Tumblr at the time. And I was seeing a lot of these currently graduating young adults kind of talk about their struggles with the job market and getting themselves established. And it was really just something that kind of left a seed of like, I, I'm going to be struggling forever if I don't really get it. I'm going to be broke, I'm going to be homeless. I have to like really, really, really make this count. I have to have a goal that I aspire to so I can get a job really easily after graduation. Right. And that's not necessarily something that every teen goes through, but it's definitely something that was on my mind very young. So in my mind I'm like, I learned these things from these struggling older millennials and I just felt like, oh, I got it. I did the right thing. I put my eggs in the right basket.
Noelle King
What were the Tumblr posts saying? Like, what exactly was triggering you?
Colton Massey
A lot of it was just lamentation of the current state. During that time it was a lot of talk about like, oh, liberal arts degrees, right? People who pursue degrees in history, in philosophy, stuff that like, they're genuinely passion but don't translate to like the, the 9 to 5 businessman type job that got a lot of like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. That's not, that's not the right direction if you want a successful life. So to me, when my parents brought up the idea of maybe computer science, maybe a cyber security, I was like, oh, that's good, I get to be on my computer even more. But like for money this time.
Noelle King
Are they computer people? Are they computer nerds?
Colton Massey
No, they're not.
Noelle King
What do they do?
Colton Massey
My dad was a police officer for almost 30 years and my mom was a kindergarten teacher, then guidance counselor.
Noelle King
Okay, so you're like, I'm gonna get this computer science degree. I will be living a stable and well paid life. And then you graduate and then what happens?
Colton Massey
A whole lot of nothing.
Noelle King
Oh.
Colton Massey
A lot of this has to do with a whole bunch of things happen at once. But a good example is my last Internship I spoke about, like, what can I do to get a full time position when I graduate? Right. They're like, there's probably going to be a position for you in June. In June. Just reach out to us in January. That's when all our positions are made. So I reach out in January, there's no position available.
Lindsay Ellis
Damn.
Colton Massey
Awesome. Cool. Back to the drawing board. And then around, I want to say April ish. I start really looking for jobs and I hear a bunch of nothing. I'm not sweating at this point. And it's June now and I'm like, okay, I haven't heard back. I have to start applying for jobs like full time, basically. So I set a pretty lofty number for myself. I feel like 20 applications a week isn't that bad.
Noelle King
20 a week?
Colton Massey
Yeah.
Noelle King
You're applying for 20 jobs a week?
Colton Massey
Some weeks I do a little worse than that. But yeah, I'm trying to.
Noelle King
Have you gotten an interview yet?
Colton Massey
I have not.
Noelle King
You have not? Okay, my friend.
Colton Massey
It's rough. It's a lot of staring at the screen. It's a lot of how much at a quick glance does my resume apply to? And then shooting off an application real quick, either through their site, through LinkedIn or Indeed or you know, any of those other job finding sites. And usually not hearing back. Or if you do, it's an automated response that's either we're very sorry or okay, I guess we'll keep looking at you a little bit more.
Noelle King
What are the feelings associated with all of this rejection?
Colton Massey
Because I am in a okay spot in every other way outside of the job. Right. Like I'm very fortunate. I don't feel as bad as someone who has a much tighter deadline would. Does that make sense?
Noelle King
Yeah. What's going right in your life?
Colton Massey
Oh, no, my parents are housing me.
Noelle King
Ah, you're living at home?
Colton Massey
Yes, I'm living at home.
Noelle King
Are you living in the basement?
Colton Massey
No, I'm living upstairs.
Noelle King
Hell yeah.
Lindsay Ellis
Okay.
Noelle King
All right, keep going, keep going.
Colton Massey
No, it's just, it's one of those things where it's like I don't have this existential pressure. I. The reason I moved back home is it wouldn't make sense to be spending 1300amonth in Philly for an apartment to be closer to my friends and where I graduated when I could just move home and just get a part time job and keep, keep applying until I get a career position and kind of keep it going from there, you know?
Noelle King
Is there any internal deadline you have set? Like if I don't get a job in coding. In a year I will, I don't know, go to grad school, get a, get a PhD in English or really think about like joining the police force or getting a trade school certification.
Colton Massey
For me it's, it's a three month timer and it's mostly just I've been not doing a part time job, I haven't gotten a part time job and when September rolls around I think that's just where I go. Obviously keep applying, keep it pushing, but I want to try and cut down on my student loans before interest starts really, really ballooning them so I can start making payments. Through that I can start chipping away at the daily things without ever dipping too crazy deep into my savings.
Nicole Hefty
Foreign.
Noelle King
Massey class of 2025 wake him up when September ends. Coming up guys. It is not just Colton. The entry level job market is a Technicolor mess and we're going to talk to a reporter who spent months trying to figure out why.
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Lindsay Ellis
You're listening to today. Explained. So my name is Lindsay Ellis and I write about careers in the workforce for the Wall Street Journal.
Noelle King
What is actually happening with hiring? What is your job like right now? Talking to all these people?
Lindsay Ellis
Yeah. So I set a goal for myself this summer to talk to a job seeker in all 50 states. Really trying to get a good pulse on what looking is like these days, how much it's changed from a few years ago. And I hear about a lot of rejection from job seekers.
Nicole Hefty
Hey there. My name is Nicole Hefty and I have been job searching for more than a year now. I think I've gone through multiple three rounds of interviews at different places and I'm still getting rejected.
Lindsay Ellis
You see spreadsheets of several hundred rows with each row being its own application.
Nicole Hefty
I put in 75, yes, 75 job applications in two months in the year.
Colton Massey
I've been looking for work.
Nicole Hefty
I've applied to over a thousand jobs now.
Lindsay Ellis
I sent out thousands of applications, you know, keeping track of who they don't hear back from, where they are in interview processes People are hustling really hard to make connections to put their name out there, and they're really hoping for any possible traction in a market that feels kind of stuck to a lot of people.
Nicole Hefty
It's been pretty horrendous out there. It just seems, I don't know, kind of like a mountain.
Noelle King
If I were to guess at what's going on, I would say this must have something to do with AI. Is that it?
Lindsay Ellis
That's a factor and I think is layered on top of a bunch of other factors that have caused the white collar market to slow considerably over the last few years. You know, starting in maybe late 2022, early 2023, companies and hiring managers were really pumping the brakes in a lot of sectors. There were the tons of tech layoffs that started in 23, but from inflation to geopolitical conflict to, you know, then the looming election and a lot of uncertainty in terms of polit policy, which, which way things were going to go. If a hiring manager is saying, hey, can we hold off on making this higher and maybe have a little bit more buffer in terms of headcount, in terms of payroll costs, you know, they might see how long they can, they can last without making that higher.
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Lindsay Ellis
There was barely any job growth at all in May and June. So we thought the labor market looked healthy, but we just completely misunderstood the.
Noelle King
State of the labor market.
Lindsay Ellis
And then you add in AI sort of as a layer on top of all of this and it's, you know, the calculation is totally different. So I talked to James Hornick, who's the chief growth officer at the Chicago based recruiting firm hirewell.
James Hornick
I'd like to say kind of jokingly that we focus on placing office dorks. We have a team that does technology, a team that does go to market sales and marketing. A team does corporate functions, which is HR and finance. So really kind of anything that you'll find.
Lindsay Ellis
And he told me that clients have all but stopped requesting entry level staff. Those young grads, you know, were once in high demand, but their work is now a home run, he said, for AI.
James Hornick
When the first iteration of ChatGPT came out, every developer I knew like immediately said this is like the best tool I've ever used. Everyone can get way more done in less amount of time, which you still need. People who are intelligent software architects, senior level devs, people who know how to create and scope out true enterprise applications. What you don't need as much of is junior people doing the more basic blocking and tackling of the code work because the AI is very good at that. The other example where you see this is in the marketing space. And that's the area I think that's been pummeled the most, even more so than software development. So a lot of our business, we have over the years partnered with lots of marketing, digital marketing firms. Right. So think of not just website development, but things like SEO and content development. And a lot of this stuff has really been in the crosshairs of AI. Specifically, a lot of agency firms would have the model where they'll hire a one to two year mark, like a team of one to two year marketers, some more junior talent to write SEO blogs and things like that. But like AI is exceedingly good at a lot of that stuff. It might not write the most interesting, it's not going to write a great novel, but it can write social posts, it can write SEO blog copy, it can do all these things that you used to have to build out, like large, large scale teams to do, and it does it for damn near free.
Noelle King
We're always trying to figure out like what is data and what is anecdata. And you can hear one story about someone who applied for three or four jobs a day for a month and got nothing. And that will be the thing that sticks in your BR forever. But the unemployment rate in the US right now is around 4.2%, which is super low. Right. So is there a tension between the one extreme story and the actual trend behind that number?
Lindsay Ellis
I think you'll see a couple of other trends that suggest that the picture is a little bit more complicated. Number one is sort of labor data on the time it takes to find a job. And there are two things that my colleagues and I have been looking at. One is for unemployed Americans. It now takes them on average 24 weeks to find a job after losing one. And that's nearly a month longer than a year prior.
Nicole Hefty
So I just got a job recently full time, but it took me six months, 75 applications, and I would say probably like six interviews at the job that I did finally land.
Lindsay Ellis
And the number of long term unemployed Americans, that's people who are unemployed for at least 27 weeks, that figure is now 1.8 million people. A year prior it was like 1.5. So that's, that's an uptick too.
Noelle King
Yeah.
Lindsay Ellis
The other factor here is, you know, you think about which sectors are hiring in this moment. You know, much of the jobs growth is coming from state and local government or sectors like health care, social assistance, leisure and hospitality, construction. You know, a white collar project manager, you know, probably wouldn't be qualified for a role in healthcare or might not be looking for a local government job, you know, in a, in a different state. So I think it's also a question of matching opportunity to Skillset and how that goes. I had a job making 130 grand as a sales project manager and I just am starting my second week at.
Nicole Hefty
A job where I am making 60 grand doing order entry and I am.
Lindsay Ellis
Shocked that this is where I am. I'm grateful that I get to pay my mortgage, but that's about it.
Noelle King
So the job application process for a long time has been, you know, there's maybe a portal and you submit your resume or, you know, you send an email to a hiring manager. Is a I changing the way we apply for jobs?
Lindsay Ellis
Oh my God, you have no idea. Oh, this has been a total fascination of mine. And what the job application process now in many ways can in my mind be described as a robot versus robot arms race, basically. So what you hear from applicants is that they are super frustrated with corporate hiring software, which for many years will scan an applicant's resume and cover letter and basic details and sort of like rank them based on their qualifications. And they feel like that artificial intelligence basically like forces good people to slip through the cracks.
Nicole Hefty
I've applied to over a thousand jobs now and I've only had 30 interviews, counting phone screenings. So I'm pretty sure AI is at play here.
Lindsay Ellis
So in response, they're using AI of their own to both craft cover letters and resumes, using the job description and their own stuff to basically like incorporate all of the keywords, show how they're responding to specific job responses, responsibilities.
Nicole Hefty
I was able to get a job after applying to over 100 different companies. I ended up using a custom GPT to be able to write custom cover letters. And so in the end, it was by using AI that I was able to finally get a job.
Lindsay Ellis
There are even tools though that scan the entire Internet for potential jobs and then just like spray out a candidate's application. Wow. Seconds. So the whole thing has left applicants and employers super irritated because employers are totally like, all of their portals are getting clogged up and it's really hard to tell, you know, who is actually interested versus who is using really good prompts or keywords. And then applicants are really frustrated because they are, you know, they'll look at a job posting on LinkedIn and it'll say how many people have applied? And it's like, shoot, I have no chance here. Should I even still do this? Then if they do put time into their application, they might get a, you know, a rejection hours later or, you know, at 2 in the morning on a Sunday. It just feels super impersonal and both sides of the table are really frustrated.
Noelle King
I mean, you go to college, you get a four year degree in data science or coding. What are young people being told to do now? Like go learn to drive a tractor? What are the options?
Lindsay Ellis
When I've been asking executives the same question? I mean, both from a. What are you talking to universities about? Because there's a lot of correspondence between business and higher ed, but also what are you telling your own kids? So I talked to the chief executive of a consulting firm in Ohio and he basically said, I'm telling my kids to really focus on jobs that really require, in person or, you know, client facing, communication. One of his children is becoming a police officer. And he said, you know, while AI will affect the way he does his job, you know, nothing replaces those relationships that are, you know, forged face to face in a community.
Nicole Hefty
It's been frustrating. I sort of gave up and I have no idea what to do now. Maybe, maybe I just, I don't know, maybe I have to go back to school, get a law degree of some sort. It's very frustrating and I feel like, what was the six years of me trying to get this Bachelor's degree worth 4? Like there's like absolutely no value to this anymore.
Lindsay Ellis
And now, I mean, chief executives are talking openly about AI's immense capabilities and how those might lead to job cuts more so than at the entry levels. I mean, you had executives at Amazon, JP Morgan in recent weeks saying that they expect their workforces to shrink considerably. The CEO of Ford said he expects AI will replace half of the white collar workforce in the us. So I mean that, those are, those are figures that suggest that people in various roles, various experience levels should, should expect significant disruption.
Noelle King
So you have spent a lot of time all over the country talking to people who are really struggling and I won. What you think about how these folks, many of them young people, are gonna deal with all this? Like the cope. What's the COPE here?
Lindsay Ellis
Many people feel quite low. I mean, it's a really hard stretch and it's a hard time to be on the market. And I don't wanna sugarcoat that. You know, I talk to some people who say what's really helped me is to get outside, you know, do some gardening, go for a run, go swimming. Swimming is great. Cause you can't really have your phone in. Um, I will say though, a lot of them are spending a lot of money to be able to hopefully speed up this process and stand out to employers and potential potential employers.
Nicole Hefty
I've been working with a career coach and improving all of my opportunities, changing my resume, using AI to help me get there, and it just seems like there's no way up.
Lindsay Ellis
You know, I talked to one guy who spent said he spent $10,000 on basically, you know, a marketing firm that's treating him as the product to basically get his resume out there, make him a website, you know, try and introduce him to hiring managers and people who might know of jobs that aren't posted publicly. So I think for some people it helps when they can funnel their frustration into I'm going to do this, I'm going to really push myself. Other people have been telling me, look like this is a marathon, not a sprint. I need to make sure I'm taking time outside of this hunt to really keep my mental health steady.
Nicole Hefty
Thankfully I still have a job, but it's not a job that I like. But hey, whatever pays the bills, right? Thanks.
Noelle King
Whatever pays the bills. That was Lindsay Ellis there from the Wall Street Journal. Today's episode was produced by Myles Bryan and Rebecca Ybarra. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and fact checked by Laura Bullard. Our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdotter. Before I go, thank you to all of you who called in and told us about the trouble you're having finding work. Your stories are frustrating and in some cases quite chilling and I really appreciate you sharing them. Thanks for that. I am Noelle King. It's Today Experience Point.
Lindsay Ellis
Thanks to Smartsheet for their support. What would you do if you had more time in the day, even just one hour more? In reality, we actually all do have more time than we think. But that extra time is sucked up by distraction.
Colton Massey
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Lindsay Ellis
To application to get a simple task done creates endless pockets for distractions to slip in.
Colton Massey
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Lindsay Ellis
Find that elusive extra time every single day.
Colton Massey
Work with flow.
Lindsay Ellis
Learn more@smartsheet.com Vox.
Nicole Hefty
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Colton Massey
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Noelle King
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In this episode, hosts Noelle King and Lindsay Ellis examine why landing an entry-level white collar job—especially for recent college graduates—has become so difficult. While record numbers of applications are being submitted, actual interviews and job offers are scarce. The episode explores the intersection of a cooling job market, technological shifts, and the profound impact of AI on the hiring pipeline. Through the stories of real job seekers and expert analysis from Wall Street Journal reporter Lindsay Ellis and recruiting leader James Hornick, the podcast unpacks how automation is transforming both the job search process and the nature of entry-level employment.
Some executives now urge young people to pursue jobs requiring in-person, face-to-face work or roles less susceptible to automation.
Some young people consider further education or dramatic pivots, unsure what degree or training is “safe” anymore.
Companies are openly forecasting major white-collar workforce reductions in coming years due to AI.
"AI Took Your Job" presents a sobering look at the modern job hunt, especially at the entry level. Recent grads and experts alike report a perfect storm of cautious employers, economic headwinds, and AI-driven automation eliminating or transforming traditional starter jobs. The application process has itself become highly automated and impersonal, leaving both companies and candidates frustrated. The episode closes with reflections on the growing need for resilience, adaptability, and—for many—the uncomfortable acceptance that the landscape for launching a career has fundamentally changed.