I know people with good degrees in similar situations. Basically no company wants to train anyone and offshores enter level jobs as much as possible.
The boomers got it completely wrong (as usual) with the “nobody wants to work” slogan. Nobody wants to hire.
I applied for more and I know multiple people who also have. I thought this was known
This story implies that unsuccessful jobseekers are lazy. Apparently, all you need to do to find a job is apply for 650 jobs, and you’ll get one. We know this isn’t the case.
I applied for c. 35 jobs when I first graduated well over a decade ago, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, until I got one. I thought that was bad enough. It was exhausting and demoralising in equal measure. Tailoring CVs, writing cover letters, answering questions on a portal which have already been answered through my CV and cover letter but which I also have to answer because everyone who works in HR is a wanker. I genuinely feel for young jobseekers today
It’s so difficult for young people these days, I did a 6 month course in IT like 10 years ago and they helped us make a CV and create a linkedin account. I was contacted by recruiters on that LinkedIn account the next day.
>estimates suggested there were 1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies
Only 17,000 graduate vacancies in the UK?
Eh a lot of this is more of a fuction of how job aplications work these days. Its fairly easy to shotgun apply for any halfway relivant job anywhere in the country and people do. So companies pretty much have to reject most applications without feedback.
About a decade ago I applied for 600 jobs – 40 interviews – 2 offers.
I sucked at interviews to begin with and got better as I got my experience of the process.
Compared to more recently I applied for 1,200 jobs – 2 interviews – 1 offer.
It is definitely harder, although I was applying for more senior roles. Fake roles existing now are definitely a thing.
Edit: Love all the speculation on my career path and choices, probably should make a game show out of it.
For everyone wondering I was applying at manager / senior product manager across basically any field including tech, finance, commercial (hence the high number of applicable roles but the low conversion and this was over a 6-month period, so 200 per month) I have a varied CV so while it means I can apply to a lot, but it also doesn’t stand out a lot either. This is what happens when you have good skills but poor specialisation.
Edit 2: This was also first six months of 2024, I don’t know if that was a particularly poor job market?
Meanwhile boomers: GeNz Is LaZy, god these people live in an alternate universe
It was 10 years ago now, but I was a uni graduate and I applied for 114 before getting an entry level position. So I can absolutely believe it.
I’ve got a friend applying for jobs rn and it’s so demoralising watching him. Also the demands these job adverts have these days! They all want an individualised essay or responses particular to that job, each one taking hours. I’ve watched him send off 100+. It’s crazy
We need a reality TV show where a camera crew follows a university graduate as they apply for jobs, but the kicker is the Grad is only allowed to follow job seeking advice given by older people…
The job market sucks and has done for years. Though it depends on how your applying to jobs. Cause if your 1 click applying with a uploaded CV on indeed, you could hit 647 applications in like 20 minutes.
If your doing custom applications, personal statements and altering your CV to fit the job then it’s a bit different. Market sucks but the Internet has made it easier than ever to find and apply for jobs, which increases competition because everyone is seeing the same jobs and can apply just as easily as you.
A decade ago it took me… About 350 applications to get a job after masters. In about 6-7 months. I started suspecting people don’t read my cv as soon as they see a foreign name, thinking I need a visa even though it was very obvious if you looked for more than 10 seconds that I don’t. I started using a fake English name and got loads of interviews straight away. Funny how that is…
I feel for the next generations of graduates, a lot of middle class salaries are bad, job prospects are few.
Jesus is it like post 2009 again.
If you have a degree just use it as a ticket to getting out of the UK(bonus, don’t repay your student loans, the whole student model is a mountain of greed so let it crash) . You can do something like teach English, or work in agriculture/service sector in Australia. Or just save up and relocate to a lower cost of living country and retire in your mid 30s.
That’s the UK, white native middle class and upper working class kids with educations/skills and savings getting the hell out, and Indians and other ‘poor country’ people still desperate to come to see it as the land of opportunity.
We’re still riding the Boris-wave with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, clamoring to get jobs in the UK from all over the World. Pre-2019, my graduate children found good jobs. Then things turned to sh*t. With fewer international students coming here, this should ease eventually.
This is just clickbait.
If you read the article the jobs she’s mostly applied for require assessment centres. This suggests she is applying for graduate schemes which have always been incredibly difficult to get one, and only take in a small percentage of graduates.
Most Finance and Accounting graduates walk into jobs straight after uni, which I suspect she has done after she changed her job expectation.
“Finance and accounting degree”, there’s the problem, gone are the days of many book-keepers, back in the day it was common for custom accounting software, then there was sage which reduced the requirement for accountants, now we have a tone of really easy to use accounting apps, and we have AI as well.
I guess most of the jobs in the market are already filled, but good on her, persistence, patient, got the job.
On the flip side, one less job for everyone else who graduated in accounting.
I have not once got an interview offer let along a job offer through LinkedIn.
You have to remember that the more well advertised a job is, the more people will apply so the pickier they can be.
Routes that I’ve found have a much higher success rate:
• Recruiters (yes, I know they can be shit and often pushy, but they also have a vested interest in actually getting you job, just make sure you actually want it).
• Friends/contacts – not easy for a grad, but knowing someone in an organisation with a position open can be a great way to basically guarantee an interview as long as it’s a decent job. I’ve got a job through a one night stand who messaged me like “isn’t this the kind of thing you do?”.
• Company websites – if you’ve had to actively seek out their site you can find jobs that aren’t well advertised and they might even be looking for someone who actively seeks them out.
Either way, 650 applications suggests both the market is tough but also they were looking in the wrong places.
I did a degree in criminology ended up working in IT, got the job an entry level because I had done years of phone based customer service work.
They said to me, we can train you up technically but it’s harder to get people to communicate. I was also a bit of a computer nerd anyway.
Fell into arse backwards and they’ve given me a high level of training and knowledge.
The key part of this is arse backwards, I was lucky, I got the right job at the right time at the right place. If any of these didn’t happen I’d have been doing the retail/customer service merry go round for years more.
It’s so shit at the moment.
I suppose there’s some inertia from the interest rate increases that is reducing the supply of new jobs, and you also have many hundreds of thousands of people coming in on graduate visas at the same time, it’s kind of a perfect storm.
One of my mates is an accountant, he started a degree, but dropped out the first year.
Not sure how he got into it, but I’m guessing you don’t need to have a degree to do it. Maybe that’s where she went wrong.
I graduated 11 years ago and still don’t have a job in the field I spent years studying and practicing (media production). I still have the same retail job I started to get me through Uni with no prospect of better pay even with added responsibilities, nor any opportunities for career progression. I do freelance in my spare time but with lots of people offering their services for very little, nobody wants to pay for it anymore. I constantly apply for jobs, not just in the field I want to go into, but hardly ever get replies even with some thorough application processes. The job market feels dead to me.
we’ve built a really shite world, but at least it’s getting worse
little bit confused that people are deriding her experience on the basis that she can’t have job searched the ‘proper way’ i.e. tailoring every single cv.
in my experience (and my friends in different industries) ‘effort’ in a job application has very little correlation to job success.
i’ve never received an interview or a job offer with a personalised cover letter and tailored cv. many of the jobs i’m applying for (on site – not just through linkedin easy apply!) have just asked you to fill in your details on their site with no additional information.
for a lot of people, it just happens to be a pretty awful market right now.
Never forget how long it took after uni to find a job. I ended up getting a role thin the post room of a law firm. Crazy because many people I worked with had masters degrees. On the other side most of them had started at 18 and stayed in the role.
The job market sucks but the tools available for finding and applying also suck now.
Whenever I hear of someone applying for such an astronomically high number of jobs I assume (I know harsh) that they have just spammed apply on every semi relevant result on a job site or linked in.
The job market sucks, but I don’t think people help themselves by just spamming applications.
Been like it for years, nothing as disheartening as doing everything ” right”, following the roadmap society has told you is the route to success just go realise at the end that the advice given has been a pile of nonsense since the early 90s…..
Am I out of touch? How do you apply for over 600 jobs? Are we classing clicking “quick apply on LinkedIn” as applying for a job?
Daughter graduated as a dentist, she was headhunted by several surgeries. I think it’s dependant on degree. She now doing her supervised training period with offers of a full time position within the next year. She considering further studies and training for cosmetic dentistry eg implant surgery.
Yeah, I enjoyed my course (basically zoology), but the lecturers were boasting of all the job opportunities and different career paths at the end of it, and then I left university, and there was literally nothing. I might as well have never bothered getting a degree. Nobody I know from the course is doing anything with their degree either.
It’s wild how companies expect fresh grads to have 5 years of experience for entry-level roles while also refusing to train anyone. The system’s broken when persistence like this is the *only* way in, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. Boomers really dropped the ball pretending this grind is some kind of meritocracy.
Part of the problem (and I notice that no-one has mentioned it yet) is the sheer scale of fake job postings that are out there. How the fuck do young people expect to get a career if their resume is getting added to a pile for something that doesn’t even exist, will never exist, and is likely only put online either to scam people out of their data or to scam shareholders into thinking they are more productive than they are.
The whole recruitment industry is filled with criminals, stealing peoples time, and manipulating the economy with false figures of how productive and active it actually is. If government had any real balls they would be rounding up all the PR, HR, recruiters, and bosses involved in this activity under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations and the Fraud Act and have them all prosecuted.
Not to say that entry level accounting isn’t competitive but applying 2 jobs per day?
When I was hunting my first accounting job I was doing 20-30 per day for the first 4-5 days, this dwindled to maybe 10-15 a week. I went for any old accounting job just to get my foot in the door, I could always look again once I get some experience.
My first job didn’t come from an application rather a call back from a recruiter (I liked your cv, how about these jobs etc) and I worked with a few other recruiters like this.
Granted I’m in the London area so more jobs but also way more competition.
One thing to also note, for industry jobs you get a lot of people applying to these entry accounting roles hoping to pivot into that particular industry like fashion, perfumes, design, IT, etc.
As mentioned i don’t deny there’s huge competition but i suspect the approach could have been better, especially if there was too much selective dream job syndrome going on.
The sad thing now is that in a lot of fields a degree isn’t enough anymore. You need experience. So if you aren’t volunteering in your spare time then forget it.
I wonder if a lot of businesses are just waiting and praying for AI to replace office work forces.
The government needs to put regulation into how AI can’t be a placement for a human being or something.
I’ve noticed more and more people going into trades like plumbing and electrician fields. It makes sense though. Become something that can’t be replaced.
No one going to comment on the fact that it took 18 months? That’s the real kicker here. Imagine going to uni, getting a degree and then not being able to find a job for a whole year and half. Even when you’re literally looking for jobs specifically designed for new graduates. In your field! Its madness.
My wife is pretty similar. She’s got at this point numerous qualifications, a degree, etc. But nobody wants to take her on. It’s baffling when you contrast the career differences we had. I left high school at 17 with no qualifications, she passed EVERYTHING. I went into an apprenticeship scheme with a dodgy company, she worked part time and did English lit/Education. I was unsatisified with the result but used it to get into college. Passed, however managed to get my foot in the door at a local tech start up, and the rest is history. I’m now earning far more than the average brit, as a SSE.
And I only got that job because the lads that came in looking for people to hire, I was the only one that turned up, the rest fucked off to greggs for an early lunch.
And I find it extremely insulting that through all the hard work she’s done (We’ve even had a kid during that time) she’s being told to go for minimum wage jobs that would send her into a depression spiral.
It’s actually so sad.
The whole “no one wants to work anymore” is rubbish, there aren’t enough jobs to go around. If we do the maths, and assume all the jobs available are real, even if all those jobs were filled you would still end up with a population the size of Sheffield without work.
Think we should make it a legal precedent for feedback to be supplied upon rejection. Highlighting the exact issues on the CV. This too could be automated if need be.
And I thought we had it bad when my year group graduated in 2007, followed by the 2008 group.
4 months and 100s of applications for me to get my first industry job. I thought I had ruined my future, but it was the jobs market slowing down. I know the 2008 graduates on the same course a year after me, the best in the group, took on average 2 years to get their first job. And that was the financial crash.
41 comments
I know people with good degrees in similar situations. Basically no company wants to train anyone and offshores enter level jobs as much as possible.
The boomers got it completely wrong (as usual) with the “nobody wants to work” slogan. Nobody wants to hire.
I applied for more and I know multiple people who also have. I thought this was known
This story implies that unsuccessful jobseekers are lazy. Apparently, all you need to do to find a job is apply for 650 jobs, and you’ll get one. We know this isn’t the case.
I applied for c. 35 jobs when I first graduated well over a decade ago, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, until I got one. I thought that was bad enough. It was exhausting and demoralising in equal measure. Tailoring CVs, writing cover letters, answering questions on a portal which have already been answered through my CV and cover letter but which I also have to answer because everyone who works in HR is a wanker. I genuinely feel for young jobseekers today
It’s so difficult for young people these days, I did a 6 month course in IT like 10 years ago and they helped us make a CV and create a linkedin account. I was contacted by recruiters on that LinkedIn account the next day.
>estimates suggested there were 1.2 million applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies
Only 17,000 graduate vacancies in the UK?
Eh a lot of this is more of a fuction of how job aplications work these days. Its fairly easy to shotgun apply for any halfway relivant job anywhere in the country and people do. So companies pretty much have to reject most applications without feedback.
About a decade ago I applied for 600 jobs – 40 interviews – 2 offers.
I sucked at interviews to begin with and got better as I got my experience of the process.
Compared to more recently I applied for 1,200 jobs – 2 interviews – 1 offer.
It is definitely harder, although I was applying for more senior roles. Fake roles existing now are definitely a thing.
Edit: Love all the speculation on my career path and choices, probably should make a game show out of it.
For everyone wondering I was applying at manager / senior product manager across basically any field including tech, finance, commercial (hence the high number of applicable roles but the low conversion and this was over a 6-month period, so 200 per month) I have a varied CV so while it means I can apply to a lot, but it also doesn’t stand out a lot either. This is what happens when you have good skills but poor specialisation.
Edit 2: This was also first six months of 2024, I don’t know if that was a particularly poor job market?
Meanwhile boomers: GeNz Is LaZy, god these people live in an alternate universe
It was 10 years ago now, but I was a uni graduate and I applied for 114 before getting an entry level position. So I can absolutely believe it.
I’ve got a friend applying for jobs rn and it’s so demoralising watching him. Also the demands these job adverts have these days! They all want an individualised essay or responses particular to that job, each one taking hours. I’ve watched him send off 100+. It’s crazy
We need a reality TV show where a camera crew follows a university graduate as they apply for jobs, but the kicker is the Grad is only allowed to follow job seeking advice given by older people…
The job market sucks and has done for years. Though it depends on how your applying to jobs. Cause if your 1 click applying with a uploaded CV on indeed, you could hit 647 applications in like 20 minutes.
If your doing custom applications, personal statements and altering your CV to fit the job then it’s a bit different. Market sucks but the Internet has made it easier than ever to find and apply for jobs, which increases competition because everyone is seeing the same jobs and can apply just as easily as you.
A decade ago it took me… About 350 applications to get a job after masters. In about 6-7 months. I started suspecting people don’t read my cv as soon as they see a foreign name, thinking I need a visa even though it was very obvious if you looked for more than 10 seconds that I don’t. I started using a fake English name and got loads of interviews straight away. Funny how that is…
I feel for the next generations of graduates, a lot of middle class salaries are bad, job prospects are few.
Jesus is it like post 2009 again.
If you have a degree just use it as a ticket to getting out of the UK(bonus, don’t repay your student loans, the whole student model is a mountain of greed so let it crash) . You can do something like teach English, or work in agriculture/service sector in Australia. Or just save up and relocate to a lower cost of living country and retire in your mid 30s.
That’s the UK, white native middle class and upper working class kids with educations/skills and savings getting the hell out, and Indians and other ‘poor country’ people still desperate to come to see it as the land of opportunity.
We’re still riding the Boris-wave with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, clamoring to get jobs in the UK from all over the World. Pre-2019, my graduate children found good jobs. Then things turned to sh*t. With fewer international students coming here, this should ease eventually.
This is just clickbait.
If you read the article the jobs she’s mostly applied for require assessment centres. This suggests she is applying for graduate schemes which have always been incredibly difficult to get one, and only take in a small percentage of graduates.
Most Finance and Accounting graduates walk into jobs straight after uni, which I suspect she has done after she changed her job expectation.
“Finance and accounting degree”, there’s the problem, gone are the days of many book-keepers, back in the day it was common for custom accounting software, then there was sage which reduced the requirement for accountants, now we have a tone of really easy to use accounting apps, and we have AI as well.
I guess most of the jobs in the market are already filled, but good on her, persistence, patient, got the job.
On the flip side, one less job for everyone else who graduated in accounting.
I have not once got an interview offer let along a job offer through LinkedIn.
You have to remember that the more well advertised a job is, the more people will apply so the pickier they can be.
Routes that I’ve found have a much higher success rate:
• Recruiters (yes, I know they can be shit and often pushy, but they also have a vested interest in actually getting you job, just make sure you actually want it).
• Friends/contacts – not easy for a grad, but knowing someone in an organisation with a position open can be a great way to basically guarantee an interview as long as it’s a decent job. I’ve got a job through a one night stand who messaged me like “isn’t this the kind of thing you do?”.
• Company websites – if you’ve had to actively seek out their site you can find jobs that aren’t well advertised and they might even be looking for someone who actively seeks them out.
Either way, 650 applications suggests both the market is tough but also they were looking in the wrong places.
I did a degree in criminology ended up working in IT, got the job an entry level because I had done years of phone based customer service work.
They said to me, we can train you up technically but it’s harder to get people to communicate. I was also a bit of a computer nerd anyway.
Fell into arse backwards and they’ve given me a high level of training and knowledge.
The key part of this is arse backwards, I was lucky, I got the right job at the right time at the right place. If any of these didn’t happen I’d have been doing the retail/customer service merry go round for years more.
It’s so shit at the moment.
I suppose there’s some inertia from the interest rate increases that is reducing the supply of new jobs, and you also have many hundreds of thousands of people coming in on graduate visas at the same time, it’s kind of a perfect storm.
One of my mates is an accountant, he started a degree, but dropped out the first year.
Not sure how he got into it, but I’m guessing you don’t need to have a degree to do it. Maybe that’s where she went wrong.
I graduated 11 years ago and still don’t have a job in the field I spent years studying and practicing (media production). I still have the same retail job I started to get me through Uni with no prospect of better pay even with added responsibilities, nor any opportunities for career progression. I do freelance in my spare time but with lots of people offering their services for very little, nobody wants to pay for it anymore. I constantly apply for jobs, not just in the field I want to go into, but hardly ever get replies even with some thorough application processes. The job market feels dead to me.
we’ve built a really shite world, but at least it’s getting worse
little bit confused that people are deriding her experience on the basis that she can’t have job searched the ‘proper way’ i.e. tailoring every single cv.
in my experience (and my friends in different industries) ‘effort’ in a job application has very little correlation to job success.
i’ve never received an interview or a job offer with a personalised cover letter and tailored cv. many of the jobs i’m applying for (on site – not just through linkedin easy apply!) have just asked you to fill in your details on their site with no additional information.
for a lot of people, it just happens to be a pretty awful market right now.
Never forget how long it took after uni to find a job. I ended up getting a role thin the post room of a law firm. Crazy because many people I worked with had masters degrees. On the other side most of them had started at 18 and stayed in the role.
The job market sucks but the tools available for finding and applying also suck now.
Whenever I hear of someone applying for such an astronomically high number of jobs I assume (I know harsh) that they have just spammed apply on every semi relevant result on a job site or linked in.
The job market sucks, but I don’t think people help themselves by just spamming applications.
Been like it for years, nothing as disheartening as doing everything ” right”, following the roadmap society has told you is the route to success just go realise at the end that the advice given has been a pile of nonsense since the early 90s…..
Am I out of touch? How do you apply for over 600 jobs? Are we classing clicking “quick apply on LinkedIn” as applying for a job?
Daughter graduated as a dentist, she was headhunted by several surgeries. I think it’s dependant on degree. She now doing her supervised training period with offers of a full time position within the next year. She considering further studies and training for cosmetic dentistry eg implant surgery.
Yeah, I enjoyed my course (basically zoology), but the lecturers were boasting of all the job opportunities and different career paths at the end of it, and then I left university, and there was literally nothing. I might as well have never bothered getting a degree. Nobody I know from the course is doing anything with their degree either.
It’s wild how companies expect fresh grads to have 5 years of experience for entry-level roles while also refusing to train anyone. The system’s broken when persistence like this is the *only* way in, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. Boomers really dropped the ball pretending this grind is some kind of meritocracy.
Part of the problem (and I notice that no-one has mentioned it yet) is the sheer scale of fake job postings that are out there. How the fuck do young people expect to get a career if their resume is getting added to a pile for something that doesn’t even exist, will never exist, and is likely only put online either to scam people out of their data or to scam shareholders into thinking they are more productive than they are.
* 1 in 5 online job postings are either fake or never filled ([source](https://gizmodo.com/1-in-5-online-job-postings-are-either-fake-or-never-filled-study-finds-2000549706)).
* 40% of companies advertise positions that don’t exist ([source](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/oct/30/ghost-jobs-why-do-40-of-companies-advertise-positions-that-dont-exist)).
* 8 in 10 recruiters post fake jobs on a regular basis ([source](https://fortune.com/2024/08/19/recruiters-posting-ghost-jobs-problem-job-seekers/)).
The whole recruitment industry is filled with criminals, stealing peoples time, and manipulating the economy with false figures of how productive and active it actually is. If government had any real balls they would be rounding up all the PR, HR, recruiters, and bosses involved in this activity under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations and the Fraud Act and have them all prosecuted.
Not to say that entry level accounting isn’t competitive but applying 2 jobs per day?
When I was hunting my first accounting job I was doing 20-30 per day for the first 4-5 days, this dwindled to maybe 10-15 a week. I went for any old accounting job just to get my foot in the door, I could always look again once I get some experience.
My first job didn’t come from an application rather a call back from a recruiter (I liked your cv, how about these jobs etc) and I worked with a few other recruiters like this.
Granted I’m in the London area so more jobs but also way more competition.
One thing to also note, for industry jobs you get a lot of people applying to these entry accounting roles hoping to pivot into that particular industry like fashion, perfumes, design, IT, etc.
As mentioned i don’t deny there’s huge competition but i suspect the approach could have been better, especially if there was too much selective dream job syndrome going on.
The sad thing now is that in a lot of fields a degree isn’t enough anymore. You need experience. So if you aren’t volunteering in your spare time then forget it.
I wonder if a lot of businesses are just waiting and praying for AI to replace office work forces.
The government needs to put regulation into how AI can’t be a placement for a human being or something.
I’ve noticed more and more people going into trades like plumbing and electrician fields. It makes sense though. Become something that can’t be replaced.
No one going to comment on the fact that it took 18 months? That’s the real kicker here. Imagine going to uni, getting a degree and then not being able to find a job for a whole year and half. Even when you’re literally looking for jobs specifically designed for new graduates. In your field! Its madness.
My wife is pretty similar. She’s got at this point numerous qualifications, a degree, etc. But nobody wants to take her on. It’s baffling when you contrast the career differences we had. I left high school at 17 with no qualifications, she passed EVERYTHING. I went into an apprenticeship scheme with a dodgy company, she worked part time and did English lit/Education. I was unsatisified with the result but used it to get into college. Passed, however managed to get my foot in the door at a local tech start up, and the rest is history. I’m now earning far more than the average brit, as a SSE.
And I only got that job because the lads that came in looking for people to hire, I was the only one that turned up, the rest fucked off to greggs for an early lunch.
And I find it extremely insulting that through all the hard work she’s done (We’ve even had a kid during that time) she’s being told to go for minimum wage jobs that would send her into a depression spiral.
It’s actually so sad.
The whole “no one wants to work anymore” is rubbish, there aren’t enough jobs to go around. If we do the maths, and assume all the jobs available are real, even if all those jobs were filled you would still end up with a population the size of Sheffield without work.
Think we should make it a legal precedent for feedback to be supplied upon rejection. Highlighting the exact issues on the CV. This too could be automated if need be.
And I thought we had it bad when my year group graduated in 2007, followed by the 2008 group.
4 months and 100s of applications for me to get my first industry job. I thought I had ruined my future, but it was the jobs market slowing down. I know the 2008 graduates on the same course a year after me, the best in the group, took on average 2 years to get their first job. And that was the financial crash.
I really worry for this crop of graduates.
Comments are closed.