Transcription
This is a 24-year-old graduate from Harvard. Even after having multiple degrees from the most prestigious university in the world, she has not been able to find a single job for more than a year.
"It was kind of depressing cuz you're like graduating from Harvard and then I was like in my parents, you know, house in Atlanta like unemployed."
And she isn't the only one like this. Hundreds of other top university graduates have not been able to find a decent job even after applying to multiple job openings. Unemployment amongst these top university graduates is at the highest level ever in history.
"23% of Harvard students were jobless 3 months after graduating."
You might think at first that this is because companies don't want to hire anymore and that the demand for employees is less and for AI is more. But you're wrong. You see, companies are hiring. In fact, the number of job openings over the past few years have more than doubled and has been rising consistently. So, what the hell is going on?
You see, the real problem is not the demands for labor, it's the over supply of labor. A few decades ago, this wasn't the case. Big companies not only paid these graduates any salary they wanted, but also fight with other giant corporations just to hire the best graduates from the top Ivy League colleges. Getting a job was much more easier back then. Even when jobs were scarce, finding one still felt possible. You could walk into a store wearing a tie, ask for the manager, and maybe get hired by the end of the week. The advice that old boomer generations gave us. Just show up and ask actually worked. Persistence was often enough to land a decent job that paid the bills.
But today, you could try that a thousand times and still never get a chance. The job market has changed completely. The bar for entry has risen to absurd heights, and the promise that education guarantees employment has evaporated. Before the 2000s, a college degree almost guaranteed a stable career. Companies happily hired fresh graduates offering wages that could support a family because if they didn't, someone else would. Now, it's the opposite. The power has shifted entirely to the employers. They're no longer fighting for us. We are fighting for their attention.
A bachelor's degree once a golden ticket is now a bare minimum. Around 70% of job listings demand one. Yet only about 30% of adults actually have it. And even that's not enough anymore. Entry-level roles now expect years of real-world experience, unpaid internships, and a portfolio that look like you've been working full-time for years. And all this for salaries that barely cover your monthly rent. Students are trapped in an impossible loop. You need experience to get a job and you need a job to gain experience. The only way out is to work for free or balance multiple jobs while studying full-time. Something most can't afford to do. And the results? A generation that's overqualified, underpaid, and exhausted before even starting.
But the deeper reason finding a job feels impossible today isn't just qualifications. It's competition. In the past, if a company wanted to hire, they'd hang a sign in the window or post an ad in a local newspaper. Applications trickled in slowly. Managers would read each of the applications one by one, met candidates in person, and made decisions based on gut feeling and personality. But today, that human connection is gone.
If a company posts a job online, it's instantly visible to thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. Applying takes seconds. There's no cost, no barrier, and no personal interaction. And because everyone knows the odds of selection are terrible, people send out even more applications just to get noticed. It's a numbers game that no one can win. What used to be a personal process has become an automated chaos. Every listing now attracts a flood of résumés, far more than any hiring team could ever read. So, companies turned to technology to filter the noise. And that's where everything started breaking.
Almost every major company now uses something called an applicant tracking system or an ATS. It's a software that scans résumés and automatically rejects most of them before a human ever looks at them. At first, these systems were simple, filtering out people who didn't meet legal or basic requirements. But over time, they evolve into something far more complex and far more ruthless. Today's ATS doesn't just check for qualifications. It hunts for keywords. It ranks every resume like a search engine ranks web pages. If your CV doesn't include the exact words used in the job description, or if your formatting confuses the system, you're instantly dropped to the bottom of the pile, no matter how qualified you are. These programs decide who gets an interview long before any human judgment comes into play.
It's not even just about rejection anymore. Many job applications you see online aren't even real to begin with. Ghost jobs listings that companies never intend to fill have flooded the market. In 2023, analysts found that nearly half of all US job postings were fake. The roles either didn't exist, were already filled internally, or were left open indefinitely for interviews. Companies do this for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they want to look like they're expanding. Other times, they already have someone in mind, but want to appear fair by advertising publicly. Some even keep listings up to collect a pool of résumés just in case they need someone later. And job boards, which make money from listings, have no reason to stop them. So millions of people waste hours applying to positions that never existed in the first place. It's an incredibly demoralizing experience. People spend days perfecting cover letters, reformatting resumes, and completing lengthy applications only to get ghosted or rejected automatically. The process feels inhuman because it is.
For employers, applicants have become data points on a dashboard, something to sort, rank, and discard. And as the hiring process has become more digital, it's also becomes more detached. Many companies don't even interview people anymore. Instead, they rely on endless online questionnaires, personality assessments, and scenario-based tests. These are supposed to evaluate critical thinking, but in reality, they often test only one thing: how well you can guess what the company wants you to say. Large corporations use these tests because they're cheaper than interviews. They eliminate the need for managers to make decisions. A computer can now decide who's a cultural fit based on multiple choice questions and behavioral algorithms. But in practice, this approach filters out individuality. The candidates who get through are the ones who learn how to game the system, not necessarily the ones who do the job best.
Even reference checks have lost meaning. Because companies fear lawsuits, they rarely give honest feedback about past employees. So, references have also become little more than formalities. The entire process is designed to protect companies, not to find the best candidates. Artificial intelligence is only accelerating this trend. AI tools can now read resumes more accurately than ever, screening out candidates based on subtle word patterns, tone, or even inferred personality traits. Employers love it because it saves time and money. But it also removes what little human judgment was left. You can be filtered out for reasons you'll never know and by a system you'll never meet.
Even when you do make it past all those barriers, there's no guarantee the job is real or worth it. Companies now drag applicants through months of interviews, tests, and unpaid projects before finally choose someone else or no one at all. Candidates are treated like an expendable resources in a machine that never stops running. Ironically, the rise of recruitment technology was supposed to make things easier. Instead, it's created an entire industry of middlemen profiting from the chaos. Recruitment agencies, job optimization services, and career coaches charge desperate job seekers to fix problems that shouldn't exist. In the UK alone, the recruitment industry is now worth over 140 billion pounds, more than double what it was just a decade ago.
All this effort, all this money, all this technology, and yet finding a stable job today feels harder than ever. Every step of the process is designed to favor companies, not applicants. And when people finally get hired, the reward is often a paycheck that hasn't kept up with inflation in decades. The problem is bigger than just bad software or fake listings. It's cultural. Somewhere along the way, we stopped treating work as a relationship between people and started treating it as a data problem. Hiring used to be about trust, about meeting someone and thinking, "I can rely on this person." Now it's about optimization, metrics, and cost cutting. Employers talk about company culture while designing systems that strip every bit of humanity out of the process.
The result is a generation that's not lazy or unmotivated, but disillusioned. They followed all the rules, studied hard, got degrees, worked internships, sent out hundreds of applications, and still ended up with nothing. It's no wonder that job burnout now begins before people even start working. And the irony is this doesn't just hurt job seekers, it hurts companies, too. When you replace human judgment with algorithms, you lose credibility. You miss out on brilliant people who don't fit perfectly into digital boxes. You create workplaces filled with people who are good at passing tests, not solving problems.
At its core, the modern job market is broken because it has forgotten what work is supposed to be: a fair exchange of effort for opportunity. Instead, it has become a maze of bureaucracy and algorithms where luck often matters more than talent. So yes, finding a job really was easier decades ago, not because life was simpler, but because the process was human. Managers hire based on potential, not filters. Applicants were seen as individuals, not keywords. And while the world has changed, the lesson hasn't. No system can replace genuine human connection. Until companies remember that, the job search will remain what it is today, a game of chance played against machines that were never built to care.
Let me know your thought in the comments and make sure to subscribe for our next interesting video coming soon. This is Rob and you're watching Beyond Economy.