‘I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs’: One in eight youths not in work or education
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp92218jpryo
by Ambitious_Lan
‘I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs’: One in eight youths not in work or education
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp92218jpryo
by Ambitious_Lan
25 comments
People don’t want to hire young people and have to deal with their drama and entitlement.
If you’re applying to hundreds of jobs and not hearing anything at all back, it’s not the market that’s the problem. The issue is probably that she’s applying for all of these vastly different jobs with the same application.
trying to find a job when you’re <18 is so difficult most employers don’t even want to deal with the hassle so they just reject you
No one wants to teach anymore, that’s the problem. I’m lucky enough to be 40 and skilled in my field, but last year I was briefly out of work and so I applied for a minimum wage tour guide job at a local museum (barely five rooms) to cover a few months. I didn’t get the job because they wanted someone with the very specific experience of being a prior museum tour guide! Come on! Just tell whoever you employ what to say, give them a stack of paper for the first week!
Must be a nightmare for kids these days. Every job wants someone overqualified and underpaid.
Anyone else find it weird that we have close to 800,000 vacant jobs yet no one can seem to find work?
I’ve seen a lot of politicians complain about young people not being in work. I’ve not seen a single one recognise how fucking *difficult* it is for young people to actually *get* work.
A good chunk of jobs advertised online are just fake listings to scrape CVs and information. Most of the real ones expect you to jump through a ludicrous number of hoops, even for minimum wage positions. Send in your CV, write a bespoke cover letter, maybe go through some sort of online assessment. Then you have to do at least one interview, with a lot of companies having multiple stages of interviews for absolutely no reason. And even then there’s a good chance the company just ghost you at any point during this process.
People, especially young people, have to waste *huge* amounts of time applying for jobs like this. If the government actually gave a shit they’d be rapping the knuckles of companies which place all these hoops in the way of prospective employees, hoops which most of the time only exist to justify HR departments having jobs themselves. But let’s be honest, when the government complain about unemployment they aren’t really interested in *getting people into work*, they’re interested in building up justifications to reduce unemployment benefits.
Far easier to import a warm body who is willing to work for terrible wage and in awful conditions than to invest in our young. They should be causing anarchy on the street
How many are ghost jobs, data farming, internal only vacancies, mlm’s, the jobs that say you can earn “£100’s daily” that turn out to be completing surveys, or watching videos for 2p a pop!
Oh I fucked around at school and no one wants me crowd
Why would you get a junior worker in many office jobs when ai can do it faster and cheaper (maybe not better yet).
There are jobs! My 20 year went to college. When he left he looked what jobs there were. He took one on a haulage yard, which wasn’t what he really wanted, but he wanted to be earning. When he’d had enough he looked around found another job in a manufacturing environment. He’s paid well, gets bonuses, gets treated well! It’s not his ideal job, but he’s happy to be earning until he finds something different.
Well there’s been lots of young people complaining about leaving the EU, and now youth mobility is back in discussions for under 30’s, they’ll soon be able to work in EU countries easily. 😉
I remember in 2012 I found it so hard to find a job online that I went around in a suit knocking on factory doors begging for anything until I found something.
Like I said, that was 2012 and it was rare for something like that to happen back then. So god knows what it’s like to get your first step on the ladder now.
I have a 1st Class Masters degree in Auto & Motorsport Engineering, been out of uni for almost 4 years, and no full time job.
Why? I graduated in 2021, at the height of Covid, where a lot of engineering companies were hesitant to employ graduates due to their limited cash stocks and the risk of hiring graduates. Come 2022, the 2022 graduate pool was ready and is naturally seen as ‘more attractive’, so I got shuffled down, repeat and repeat to the present day.
And it’s not like I didn’t try. Hundreds of applications, tons of earlier-level interviews both online and in-person at a wide range of companies in the wider sphere, as well as final-stage interviews at a prominent automotive company and an F1 team. I did do a year-long placement as part of my degree at a well-known company in the automotive industry, but unfortunately they couldn’t offer me (or any other placement student at the time) a graduate role there and then as they were going through a round of redundancies at the time (I applied to their graduate programme, but got no answer despite using my internal contacts).
It’s so miserable applying for jobs, because you spend so much time into getting an up-to-snuff application in, and 90% of the time you hear *nothing*. Not even a ‘thanks but no thanks’.
Thankfully I’ve found work in the esports industry, but at the moment it’s only freelance/self-employed/part-time. I’d love to turn it into full-time, but atm those opportunities are very limited if they ever pop up.
I lucked the fuck out with my job, but for so many entry level positions I applied for before wanted relevant experience in the field. ENTRY LEVEL
So many issues here – I’m gonna get downvoted to hell, but screwit… here’s a bunch of generalisations, feel free to take your poison:
We’ve got mass migration reaching over a million people a year coming here suppressing the job market. That generally affects the working classes more than anyone else. 20 years ago they’d have got work in a factory or warehouse, now those jobs are generally taken by Eastern Europeans who will definitely work harder than some 18 year old who’s been ruined by a shit education system and probably shit parenting to boot… and they wouldn’t know the meaning of hard work if it slapped them in the face.
We’ve had at least two generations of spoiled dickheads who think they’re entitled to everything handed to them on a plate without doing any work. The nuclear family is dying and the outcomes of kids with a single parent are statistically worse.
Teaching sucks because teachers are treated like shit by the parents so why bother doing a job that is underpaid and undervalued? Loads of kids never do any reading at home, never mind studying for exams. How the hell is an undereducated 18 year old who’s only passion is to smoke weed and finger his girlfriend at a bus stop supposed to find work. I see so many young adults who have clearly not read a book since Peter and Jane go to Asda, they’ve certainly never studied for an exam in their lives. There’s only so many apprenticeships to go around.
Don’t even get me started on the 5 years of experience in a related field bollocks. They use it for most jobs now because they have so many applicants they might as well filter out as many as they can before they even read a CV.
I know many of my former Army colleagues would hate this idea, but we need national service… proper national service. 12 months away from their spoiled lifestyles where they’re taught the meaning of an honest day’s work. If they don’t want to do service in the military, fine, you’re working in care homes looking after those poor bastards who paid their taxes their whole lives and are getting shat on by successive governments. Oh and slash migration until we’re at the very least net migration of zero, so they’ve got some kind of chance of getting on the property ladder in the next 15 years.
It’s going to get even worse when more companies start using AI to filter out applicants in an instant. Your CV will be read by no one, and one wrong word or sentence will result in an immediate rejection.
Every single student graduating my MSc programme walked into a job. Companies were begging to get in front of our students. But the uni wouldn’t lower domestic tuition so they don’t go into our programme. My programme closed despite having a huge demand to hire our graduates and being praised across the sector.
The other aspect is that companies want quantitative skillsets and maths skills are really poor in the UK. Our students with those skills walk into jobs typically, but domestic students just aren’t going into those programmes. International students are enrolling in advanced stem degrees we teach, domestic students just don’t enroll.
My wife is a youth librarian and literacy skills are poor as well.
As a society we have let our youth down. Maths and literacy are vital for success for it’s just lacking here
This is why Starmer’s Youth Mobility deal with the EU is so foolish.
If you’ve got rising unemployment in the UK, thanks to the job tax, you have to be nutso to increase competition for jobs by importing hordes of unemployed EU citizens.
I think part of the problem is that the minimum wage is too high, maybe. Especially for over 21s. Businesses don’t want to pay that much for inexperienced people. Why pay that much for someone with no experience when you can get someone with 5 years experience for only a little bit more per hour?
My take is that most companies are not hiring graduates because they expect them to leave sharpish.
I remember my best mate had applied for over 800 jobs in his field after leaving Uni about 20 years ago. So this is not a new trend.
For the first in a long time I can understand the frustration of firing off hundreds of applications to not hear anything back. Temp/FTC are in abundance but not permanent roles
FYI it’s not just young people the UK is importing horrid recruiting practices from the US including Workday platform, 6-7 interviews (which is designed to ensure you take so much time off and involved you’ll take a lower offer).
Not to mention ghost jobs, job boards actively scraping and putting up fake roles, scammers stealing IDs and recruiters ghosting people then taking 10% of the wage.
The UK jobs system is fucked.
It’s a tricky one. I’ve been on the other side being a recruiting manager. I’ve recruited for a level seven role (grade one is an entry level admin role and goes up to seven which is a senior analyst/lower management role).
Bearing in mind a level seven is responsible for managing customer contracts, lower level negotiations, mid term finance planning etc, I get applications from blatantly unqualified people.
The last role I advertised internally and externally had around 50 applications and around half of these were from younger people whose CV, experience and skill set placed them instead at around a level two/three.
These were filtered out prior to the interview stage and both myself and HR received complaints from five or so applicants who claimed they should be given an interview anyhow. They were actually annoyed they had been filtered out under the company filtering rules, they were simply not ready for that kind of role and it was suggested they look into bridging the experience gap first. I even suggested that I could act as a mentor to them if they were really keen on a similar role in the future, all of them turned it down.
I am not disputing it is extremely challenging for younger people to gain employment and experience, but the expectation that they can just walk into a higher grade role without the relevant experience also needs managing.
I’m currently applying for a public sector position, stated short listing will take 2-3 weeks. We’re currently 6 weeks and counting. I’m thankful I already have a job and this is a lateral move, but god forbid I needed the job for access to immediate income.
HR love to drag their feet to justify their existence it seems.
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