Imagine this: It’s 2025, you’ve just spent the last four years after high school working to save up money and gain experience, or you’ve spent these years studying to become employable in a field of your choosing. You’ve worked hard and filled your extra time studying, interning and building connections. The year or two of school you lost to COVID are a distant memory.

You’ll graduate and get your degree, then send out hundreds of applications to jobs and internships. If you’re applying to an entry-level position, good luck! You’ll need three to five years of experience to be qualified for that gig meant to be for recent grads with almost no experience!

Nine times out of 10, these entry-level job applications will go unseen. An AI resume-checker will block yours from getting seen by human eyes. If you do hear something and it’s positive, there’s a good chance you won’t actually talk to anyone real, and then get ghosted again.

But what happens when you’ve got the job, settling in and actually doing the work? Are you going to get laid off after six months because your coworkers and higher ups think that you’re “quiet-quitting” or lack basic communication skills because maybe taking criticism is hard? Or because forming relationships with your team is difficult? Could it be because you refuse to do work above your position unless you get fairly compensated for it?

These are concerns and scenarios that the upper tier of Gen Z 一 like myself 一 is facing.

Why is this?

The current job market that young people are faced with actively works against us in an economic state where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting desolate.

Getting a part-time job at a grocery store is difficult. I couldn’t even get employed at Trader Joe’s. Keeley Marie, @fine_ten on Tiktok, has a Master’s Degree and was denied a janitorial position.

So who’s really hiring anymore?

Looking at the job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed or any other job board site, you’d think it would be easy for young people to find work due to the volume of open positions listed. But it’s fools gold.

“Ghost jobs” are a major issue. LinkedIn and other job sites are inundated with them.

So what is a “ghost job?” According to the hiring platform Greenhouse, they’re “positions advertised with no intent to hire.” This makes up about 18-22% of the jobs posted on Greenhouse’s site in any given quarter. A fifth of listings, any given quarter, of fake listings on any job board or job site is a lot and many people applying probably won’t even realize they’re fake until after they’ve applied.

A 2024 report from MyPerfectResume, an online resume-building platform, revealed that “The vast majority of recruiters surveyed (81%) admit that their employer posts ads for jobs that either don’t exist or are already filled. When it came to why they posted ghost jobs, 38% said it was “to test the market’s response to hard-to-fill jobs,” while another 38% said it was to “maintain a presence on job boards even when we aren’t hiring.” To 36%, posting ghost jobs was meant to “assess the effectiveness of their job descriptions.”

Applying to jobs the last two years for people fresh out of college has been referred to online by Gen Z as “the trenches.” I couldn’t agree more.

Making job-searching our job and sending out 20+ applications a day feels like you’re hopelessly toiling away. We’re taking outdated advice from those with stable jobs about what to do in the search process 一 “Oh, tailor your resume to different jobs and companies,” “Go see them in person,” 一 and are sending our resume into the void.

@whateversydwants on Tiktok sums up what many people are experiencing and feeling in her post from March 5, 2025: “Unless you’ve been on a job search in the last two years, you do not know how bad it is out here. The job market is trash, basura, it’s been bad. I’m talking about applying to 20 jobs a day, reaching out to recruiters, doing this on LinkedIn and hearing crickets.”

Since the end of COVID, the market has changed drastically. Before the pandemic, an entry-level job was just as it sounds: entry-level. The descriptions for entry-level positions and preferences/requirements for them could be taken at face value. In 2018, if someone applied for an entry-level job whose description said “no degree or previous experience needed,” that was true because companies were willing to train new hires.

Now, most entry-level positions require three-to-five years of experience outside of schooling along with the fact most companies have outdated training programs for new hires and view Gen Z/recent college graduates so poorly that they don’t even think we’re worth being trained because we lack soft skills. Are we as adept in those skills as previous generations, no? We were unable to fully develop those due to being deprived of social interactions needed to hone them. We couldn’t even finish high school and missed half of our college experience.

In a survey that the General Assembly 一 an education organization focused on training tech skills 一 conducted, they found that “a striking 58% of those who believe entry-level employees aren’t ready for the workforce also say their companies don’t offer enough training.” They also found that “training stipends and learning budgets aren’t always used.”

In a market where there seems to be endless openings, a concerning amount of Gen Z is struggling. We want an opportunity to put the skills we learned to use. Many of us just need others to take a chance.