How recent grads are dealing with the shrinking pool of entry-level jobs: 'None of us are really thriving'

As is the case for many young Americans, Ashley Terrell says her parents always had the expectation that she'd go to college and land a job in her chosen profession.

More than a year after graduating, Terrell, 23, says she is still struggling to land something that fits her skill sets full-time.

"I am still on the job hunt," Terrell, told CNBC Make It in mid-November. "It is something I have to motivate myself every day to kind of wake up and do."

Terrell graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2024 with a bachelor's degree in business administration and hoped to work for a startup doing content strategy or marketing.

Despite months of networking and filling out job applications throughout her senior year, the only offer Terrell received was promoting power tool products at a local Home Depot for $25 an hour.  

She felt the retail-focused job didn't align with her experience or career goals, so she started looking for a new job within weeks. That led to a new role with a pay cut at a local Marriott hotel, but she was laid off in September 2025.

It's no secret the job market is tough right now: Hiring has been down for the better part of the year, people are clinging to their jobs, and there are signs that layoffs are ticking up.

As for the youngest workers, over 2 million people earned their bachelor's degrees in the spring of 2025; just 30% of those graduates reported finding a full-time job in their field, according to a June and July survey from Cengage Group, an education tech company.

Gen Z is now figuring out how to compete in an increasingly tight job market and deciding whether a college degree is still the key to landing a stable job.

Some 76% of employers reported hiring the same number or fewer entry-level employees in 2025 than in 2024, according to the Cengage report. Their reasonings for less robust hiring were due to a tightening labor market, the rise of AI and broader economic pressures like inflation and new tariff policies.

The slowdown is largely a result of businesses that over-hired in the post-pandemic economy in 2021 and 2022 and offered high salaries to compete for talent, says Nich Tremper, a senior economist for payroll and HR service provider Gusto.

Many of those hires have not moved on from their positions, and companies are now slower to take on new employees or refill roles, he says.

Meanwhile, layoffs are at their highest level since the pandemic, with 1.1 million announced job cuts between January and October 2025, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

As a result, "folks are kind of just sitting still," Tremper says. "They're not looking for new roles, they're not leaving their current roles. Without those new jobs available, it's hard for an entry-level employee to get their foot in the door and start their career." 

The unemployment rate for recent college grads has been climbing since 2022, reaching 9.7% as of September 2025, the same as for 20- to 24-year-olds with only a high school diploma, according to Federal Reserve data. The unemployment rate for new college grads tends to be lower than for those with a high school degree but the two have converged in recent years.

Early-career joblessness can have a compounding effect on workers, Tremper says. Young professionals "move around a lot to increase your earning potential, to increase your wages now and over your lifetime," he says. "A frozen labor market, especially for people in their 20s, means that that's just not happening for them."

AI is another reason why businesses have pulled back on hiring, Tremper says.

The technology isn't necessarily replacing human workers en masse, he says, but it's allowing businesses to hire more slowly as they evaluate the best place to add new employees: "They're able to use AI to fill the gaps as they're thinking about their overall hiring strategy and what that looks like going forward."

Some young job seekers, including Terrell, say they feel AI looms large in their challenges to finding a job.

"I have noticed in the last couple months, especially since this summer, that there have been fewer job postings that I am qualified for just because I feel like AI is taking away some of those jobs," Terrell says.

She adds that many of her friends have given up on finding a job that will use the expertise of their college degree.

"Some of them have kind of settled for the underemployed route and have taken those jobs, and some of them went to trade school," she says.

One such person who went into the trades after college is 25-year-old Chris Henderson. He graduated from New Jersey's Rowan University in 2022 with a degree in business management. 

He planned on getting a corporate finance job after college but says he didn't find anything in his desired salary range. After three months of job hunting, he decided to work for his family's electrician business.

While job searching after graduation, Henderson recalls his father telling him that there will always be work in the electrical field and that he could "always fall back on the trades" if the white-collar job market wasn't steady.

Henderson went through two years of trade school and now makes about $72,000 a year. He plans to use his business degree to either run his family's business one day or start his own contracting company. 

He's hopeful the development of electric vehicles will mean more steady work as he progresses in his career.

"I actually do find it really satisfying and fulfilling as an electrician, because [there's] nothing better than working with your hands and completing a job that you did on your own"

Electrician jobs are expected to be among the 20 top-growing jobs in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as more job openings for construction workers, nurse practitioners and registered nurses, software developers and home health care aides.  

Despite not using his bachelor's degree in his current career, Henderson doesn't regret going to college.

"There's certain aspects of college that teach you things like no other, such as time management," he says. "I think that college was really a great route to really know what is your true passion."

And though she's still searching for a job, Terrell agrees.

"The biggest way it paid off for me was just being able to grow a bit more independent, away from my parents and to get some life skills," she says.

She's still hopeful about landing a job related to her degree and finds that referrals from her network make the biggest difference in landing interviews. But the search can be hard when many of her classmates also seem stuck, she says.

"Things are just changing really, really fast around it seems like all industries, not just one," she says. "Half of the classmates that I graduated college with didn't have a job when they all walked the stage with me. And so it kind of feels like we're all in the same boat of, how can we help each other when none of us are really thriving?"

Flat hiring for young workers today could become a growing concern for the next 10 to 20 years, Tremper says, "as these folks are trying to get skills that are able to support their long-term career progression, their overall wage growth, and also their own promotion potential."

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