Transcription
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, new Gen Z workers make up the highest share of the unemployed in nearly 40 years, with only 30% of recent graduates securing full-time jobs in their field of study. Yet, despite 98% of HR leaders claiming they struggle to find talent, 89% refuse to hire Gen Z, raising the question, why is the most educated generation in history becoming ghosted by minimum wage jobs?
While you'd think that with each modern generation facing a worse job market than their parents, with nearly half of the entire workforce unable to afford even a minimal quality of life, that as Gen Z voices their frustrations over facing the worst entry-level job market in nearly four decades, the worst layoff since the Great Recession, the second straight year of historic job revisions, the majority of H-1B approvals actually going to entry-level positions, only to then be told the job market has never been stronger, that all of this decay would finally be enough to force a nation to confront a system that has filled generation after generation, but instead society refuses to evolve, dismissing it all as laziness and entitlement.
"They don't want to work. They, they're, they're spoiled brats. They grew up in a world where it's everyone gets a trophy generation and like the idea of showing up and going through traffic and being at the office at 8:45 and working till 6:00. They look at you like you got 10 heads to it. They think everything's on a silver platter. So, it's very hard to motivate these people. They're really lazy, entitled losers."
So, while Gen Z will apparently be forced to endure the same stereotypes as every previous generation, the reality is that this employment crisis largely stems from the complete gutting of entry-level jobs. Despite overwhelming evidence that AI is nowhere near fully automating the job market, with MIT finding that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, alongside the majority of AI layoffs now resulting in rehires. A survey of more than 600 recruiters worldwide, with over half coming from Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies, found that one-third of employers are nevertheless replacing entry-level jobs with AI, even if those responses were simply an attempt to inflate investor confidence and boost stock prices. A separate rumé.org survey found that by 2027, 47% of employers expect to eliminate entry-level roles entirely.
Which means that whether AI actually works and unemployment skyrockets or it completely backfires and results in a reduction in household wealth worse than 2008, the outcome remains the exact same as it always has. The burden falls on the generation entering the workforce. To better understand the long-term repercussions eliminating entry-level jobs has on Gen Z and the future of the job market, I spoke with Brian Kreley, a corporate recruiter, hiring manager, HR professional for some of the world's largest companies, career coach, and creator of the YouTube channel, "A Life After Layoff."
"The funnel into an organization is really supposed to be you give people the the baseline opportunities to not only just learn the technology and the the like demonstrate those skills so that they can move into more advanced roles in an organization, but it's also to learn corporate culture. That that base level is you're supposed to be sitting in those meetings with the the more senior people and taking notes and observing through osmosis. And if they're going to eliminate that entire thing, what is the leadership going to look like? The senior level positions in an organization in in five years, in 10 years. At the same time, they're also eliminating the middle managers. So, it's like you're being squished. So, now you've got these senior level people. These executives are loving it because they get to, you know, they get to make money rain. They get their bonuses and all this stuff, but I don't know if they're actually thinking through the big picture of you're eliminating the development of the the youngest generations and you're also eliminating the middle manager positions for these senior level people to move into. So now you're basically creating a single band of people who are stuck in a very narrow range of roles that's not entry-level, that's not leadership, it's in between. And then you got this executive kind of like sitting up in an ivory tower making these decisions. So what's it going to look like in 10 years from now when there is that crunch and now all these senior executives are are retiring?"
And while the lack of investment and gutting of entry-level jobs existed long before the IRA, the unfortunate reality is Gen Z is also competing for these limited positions against older, more experienced, and overqualified workers being forced to accept entry-level pay. According to Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, employment among Gen Z workers aged 22 to 25 declined by 16% in the occupations most exposed to artificial intelligence, while older workers in those same occupations continued filling those roles instead. Today, 2/3 of all entry-level roles are filled by workers with over 7 years of work experience, while 61% of full-time entry-level positions require 3 to 5 years of experience. The Federal Reserve suggests this could be the result of decades of career and wage stagnation as traditional routes for career advancement such as job hopping now provide little financial benefit, ultimately creating a compressed career ladder where 52% of graduates are underemployed within a year of graduation, while a study by the Burning Glass Institute found that 73% will remain underemployed a decade later.
"The candidate who's coming into that interview who maybe had that that capability, who has that competency, who has that potential, just doesn't have a resume to prove it, now has that that stigma going against them of like, well, you're not hirable. You're not good. You're not going to be a good fit for us. Because I, I, I've heard those conversations. I've heard hiring managers making stories up about people based on what's on their resume or what they've achieved in the past, and they start creating these stories. Well, this guy's not hirable. This guy's not promotable. He, he didn't get promoted at his last job. If he was truly a high performer, why didn't this other company or these other two companies ever recognize their their their capability? And and I would like look at them and say like, how do you know what this person has or hasn't done or is capable of without even looking at them? Just, just you're, you're, you're telling a story. Maybe the whole story isn't on a piece of paper. Maybe the whole story isn't my bias toward what I think this candidate's career should have looked like because when I started my career, things looked a lot different."
And to prove just how deep the stigma actually is, LinkedIn's own algorithm has been shown to suppress profiles with employment gaps. While ATS services and job platforms suppress or automatically reject applicants working lower wage jobs such as grocery store clerks or restaurant servers because, in the eyes of many employers, they signal class, resulting in a labor market where Gen Z is fundamentally trapped in a cycle of low-paying jobs with little opportunity for advancement. Today, Gen Z accounts for 55% of all multiple job holders, the highest share of any generation in well over a decade, leaving 83% reporting burnout, while 61% have delayed or avoided preventative health screenings.
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Unfortunately, just as millennials were told to simply "learn to code," rather than having an honest conversation about collapsing entry-level jobs, crushing student loan debt, competition against older workers, rampant automation, and the rising cost of living, society's solution for Gen Z has simply become "go into the trades." Despite having spent years covering the decline of vocational education and the stigma surrounding blue-collar work, I still believe the trades are an excellent career path for many people. But pretending that they can absorb an entire generation will only recreate the exact same bottlenecks that white-collar workers are already facing. A new Wallet Hub study ranking the best and worst entry-level jobs in America found that trade careers dominate the bottom of the list based on immediate opportunity, growth potential, and job hazards, while also ranking among the nation's least happy occupations. But more importantly, nearly every single one of my friends who are in the trades have recently been telling me that if they were to enter their trade today without their years of experience, their industry connections, or overall reputation, they are convinced they would not be able to find a job because of increased competition and an overall economic downturn in their industry.
So, while Gen Z has effectively become the test dummies for AI in both classrooms and entry-level careers, only to be turned around and called lazy and entitled, despite working more jobs simultaneously than any previous generation, with society's only real solution becoming "go into the trades," it is crucial that if we care at all about the future of our nation and the children who have no idea the economy they're about to inherit, we begin having honest conversations about how to actually course-correct before another generation is forced to pay an even worse price.
"Unfortunately, I know people are not going to want to hear this, but I think that this is un this is going to be the new norm. Like, I don't think that we're going to return to a job market. Like, some people are like holding out like, well, eventually things will improve. They may because things break completely and you have to rebuild, but like what's the what's the pain involved in that? That that's a much bigger like Great Depression level kind of event. I know some people will throw out like, well, we just need universal basic income. I have my own strong opinions about that. Um, there's not necessarily a clear endgame that looks great. And I like I'm not I'm not trying to be doom and gloom about this. I I do think that there's still if you have you take you take faculty of your own career, you're you're really driving things. You take you you treat it like you are the CEO of a business of one. you you know you build multiple people don't like to hear us but you got to build multiple streams of income so that you're not beholden to any one single paycheck and single employer that you're not knee-jerk reacting. You actually build your career with an actual strategy. There is a process to do that and so many people do not do that mainly because they're not never taught that in in university or wherever. they kind of just throwing it's like throwing the baby bird out of the nest and saying figure it out yourself and most people not surprisingly don't really do a good job of that. But I I just don't see that this is a a fixable problem without there being a wholesale change in how we approach like and I'm not just saying like we as the the the job seeker. What I'm saying is like society looks at what role the human being plays in where we want this society to go in the future. And so what I hope that we're beginning to recognize is that as a society, if we have any desire to have the future be just a little bit better than today, to have the future be just a little bit better than the past four decades, we have to stop putting these blanketed statements on every single massive systemic decay that has been causing issues for as long as we can remember. I just cannot understand for the life of me how every generation emerging into adulthood, at least every modern generation. No, really, I mean, I'll show you uh there's a quote from Plato discussing older workers or older people saying that young people are lazy. But the unfortunate reality is that as a society, instead of these older workers or each generation during their period of time, instead of pointing up at the people that are actually undercutting their wages or making them work more hours for less pay or reducing uh retirement benefits, reducing paid time off, aren't able to keep up with the cost of living or reducing health insurance benefits, you know, you name it. instead of pointing at the people actually doing the issues, what better person to point your fingers at than the little guy that has no power to stand up for themselves. And the biggest thing that I really cannot understand is that when you hear a hiring manager or or somebody say they're traditionally in their their 50s or so, the people that really have power to be making these decisions, the people on the news, you know, pumping out these headlines. When they say the young generation is lazy and entitled, the likelihood of that 55-year-old individual saying that having a kid that is graduating from college or already has is unbelievably high. So are you saying the reality is that every Gen Z is lazy except for your kid? Are you saying that you had absolutely no responsibility in helping parents the future generation? How do you point at young kids and say, "Yeah, they're addicted to the to social media, to their phone. Who handed them their phone?" Older adults, do we have no responsibility for the country and and the the reality that we're a part of? You're telling me that every single systemic decay falls on the little guy or falls on all these other things, right? Like a massive narrative is that the entire job market is collapsing because of minimum wage, right? Like that is a real argument. I get that on every single one of my videos. So, it's blanketed statement after blanketed statement after blanketed statement and we fail to recognize that we are all experiencing the exact same thing. The thing that makes me the most sad out of all of this is that, you know, Gen Z as as a generation, we have the opportunity to genuinely make a difference because we recognize the issue. We are at the age to where we are being vocal about it. It's kind of bad enough that we have to address it. And so what we have to do is we have to not only pay the burden of previous decades of economic mismanagement uh economic mismanagement but we also have to start envisioning the future. But the unfortunate reality is that as a generation predominantly again not every single person but predominantly we've lost hope. We've already given up. There's a reason why Gen Z is called the nihilistic generation. And so if you have already given up and you have no hope, then we're grouped right in with every other generation. And the very frustrating thing for myself, because again, like I I'm going to address the systemic issues. I'm then going to come on and I'm going to do something like this at the tail end of the video because I want to give you inperson one-on-one kind of why does this matter? And then at the end of the video, I address, hey, these are things that we can do. Now, I can't not necessarily address, hey, here's how you face decades of economic uh, you know, destruction of entry-level jobs. There isn't just a solution I can give you for that. And I hope that you kind of recognize that there are individual things that you could do to help better your opportunities of getting a job. Like Brian with a life after layoff has plenty of those those things on his channel. But what I do here is I just try to talk about the systemic issue. And to be able to fix the systemic issue because we're not the ones writing the policy and we're not the ones making the corporate decisions is we have to change our attitude and our desire to make things better. We are the ones that are are have each other's hands around each other each other's throats. We're the ones not making decisions in our own lives. And so what I do is I say, "Hey, these are ways that you can do agency and here's why you should have hope and you know do this or do this. Try to look at this through your personal life. When was the last time you talked to your neighbor? When was, you know, when was the last time you had these conversations? And so then I offer things of, hey, make sure that you go out and vote. You know, one of the reasons that this happened was because there was no Gen Z uh turnout. And then what comments do I receive? There's no point in voting. Voting doesn't do anything. So why would I waste my time? And so then I go into my friends, right? Because you would say, well, you know, go touch grass. So I go talk to my friends. Not a single one of them will vote either. Okay. So voting isn't an option. So then I do something like, "Hey, here's a petition that we're trying to work on. You know, this is this is what what we're trying to do and and raise awareness." Uh, and then what comments do I receive? Uh, the petition isn't going to do anything. Everything sucks. There's no hope. Why would I even waste my time? Okay. So now I go to my friends and I start talking about this and they say, "Nothing's going to change." Okay. So we're not going to vote and we're not going to do petitions. So then I do this um you know I I I help promote this thing to raise awareness for uh the pursuit of of uh raising awareness for humanity verse AI that we need to prioritize humanity over all of these other things. And we have to get our policy makers to actually start regulating these things and and work on the different aspects of what it is that's going on. Uh, what do I receive? It's never going to do anything. Why would I even bother? Our policy makers don't do anything. It's just greed. It's just corruption. They don't care about us. All right. I go to my friends. Hey, what do you think that's going on? I get nothing. Okay. So, I continuously go around and I try to talk to people in real life. There's nothing. But you know what it is that we do talk about is we talk about the basketball game. We talk about soccer. We talk about the the celebrity, the the next movie, right? We talk about all of these things, but everything actually impacting our lives, we refuse to have conversations about. And so now I'm in this position to where I'm thinking, okay, so we're not going to vote. We're not going to do petitions. We're not going to do uh, you know, any sort of of movement or to get our representatives um interacting. I talk about, hey, let's do these boycotts. Nope, we're not going to do that either because, you know, that's not going to work. Okay. I talk about, hey, maybe we need to start talking about creating uh a better form of unions. Oh, unions are just bad. It's never going to work. So, I'm at this point to where every single time I produce or I try to mention something and I try to talk about agency within your own life and all of these different things. All I'm now getting is an overwhelming tsunami of why it's not going to work. The unfortunate reality is that if you have a a a little brother, a little sister, or a little son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, that in a decade and 15 years from now, we are going to hear the exact same thing from them, that there's no entry-level jobs. And they're going to look at us and they're going to say that we had it so easy. They're going to be upset that we didn't do more for them. And it's a travesty. That is going to be such a sad reality. I if we're deciding that that is the path that we're going to go on that there is no hope that there is no there's no chance for unity there's no chance for anything that we can do you know I think at the end of the day that's an individual decision that we're making I don't think anybody is forcing us to decide that the fact of the matter is is that yes things will not better be get better if we give up there's no incentive for the people in power to get to have things get better but there's a lot of incentive for us to demand that from them."
Going back to the societal stigma. My um my mom is a hair stylist and so she has many many many clients. I hear this all of the time. Uh they come in and they say, "So, what do your sons do?" She'll be like, "Well, my my youngest son works at a hardware store and my oldest son is a YouTuber." And she receives, "Oh, I'm so sorry." She's like, "Why?" She's like, "Uh, you know, when is your son ever going to get a real job?" You know, referencing me. Um, when is your son ever gonna move out move out of your your when is your son ever going to move out of your basement? Uh, I've been living on my own for five plus years. Um, you know, when when you know I'm sorry that your son isn't taking taking life serious. You know, kids these days, right? It's the most insane thing. They have no idea what it is that I'm talking about. They never ask. They never have, you know, they don't actually have any interest whatsoever. And so, what do they turn around and do? Well, they use the entire appointment with my mom to just complain about their own kids. Now, their own kids aren't participating in society and all of these different things. And then, you know, my mom will ask, "So, what is it that you're doing?" And the parent says, "I've already given up." The kid's like 14. I've already given up. It's in my incentive to do the best that I can to try to help out that person, to help out all of the Americans and all of the people worldwide that are facing these issues that maybe don't have the opportunity to even think about these things or speak about these things, to say it. And so what I need from you is to believe it, to have hope, to see these things and want to make a difference, to not just give up. And you know, I don't know. Last night I filmed this video and filmed it until 2:30 in the morning. Wake up this morning. It turns out that the audio didn't record, right? So fantastic. And so now I'm doing this on the 4th of July. I am late to where it is that I'm supposed to go and I need to get this video out and I I just hate sitting here thinking that it's not doing anything. And again, I know it's helping the those individuals out there, but and that is again why I'm doing it. But for the the overall tone of my generation, I just don't see I don't see where the voices are out there that are saying, "Hey, let's not give up." And um I don't know. So, you know, again, are the trades a great opportunity for you? Absolutely. But not for everybody. We have to start talking about what are things that we can do to fix the system, not just ways we can succeed individually. Fix the system. And so, um, you know, I I hope that this was able to provide some sort of value to you. And um you know I greatly appreciate your support and I'm sorry that I did take this this time I guess to just complain but I think it's really important that we hear the the things that that we're experiencing. Um and I think that this is a common narrative for a lot of different people. Um if you don't mind just checking to see if you you are subscribed or subscribe if you would like to. I would greatly appreciate that sub that sub uh sub support. My goodness. Um and uh like the video if you haven't already done so. So, thank you all so much for your time.