Thank god i'm not young! Because there's no way in hell I could ever find my first job in this market where nothing is what it seems.

I pray I never have to search for a new job again, because from the looks of it, the market got awesome at firing, horrible at hiring, and practically non-existent at hiring beginners.

The Job That Doesn't Exist Yet Asks for Three Years of Experience

How frustrating is it to apply for a job labeled "entry-level" and discover it requires three years of experience, fluency in six software platforms, and ideally a minor in machine learning?

Clearly, that's not an entry-level job. That's a mid-level job pretending to be entry so the company can pay you less.

Yet another friend of mine lost her job a couple of days ago. She was working in IT. Not as a developer or anything truly technical, but something along the lines of coordinating developers, being the middle-man between them, their boss, and each other.

She was basically the person who was doing the talking for people who aren't good at talking. Team manager, project manager, jack of all trades, and word whisperer for code whisperers.

I suppose they figured out they can do the communication and coordination themselves, or maybe ask ChatGPT to form some coherent sentences in their stead. Ha! They're in for a big surprise. I already tried talking to ChatGPT and it gets very weird the moment I get weird.

My guess: they're going to fail. But until then, my friend is stuck looking for a job in a haystack. And since she needs money fast and her previous job is not exactly something clearly definable, she's looking at everything, especially entry-level.

The Numbers Are Not Being Subtle. Or good.

Entry-level postings have dropped 29 percentage points since January 2024, based on Randstad's analysis of 126 million global job postings.

In tech specifically, junior roles have basically evaporated — programmer employment fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025, and some markets saw even steeper drops.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 22 to 27 hit 9.7% in late 2025 — roughly the same as for people who never went to college at all.

That convergence alone tells you something has structurally broken. And it didn't break yesterday. Companies massively overhired in 2021 and 2022, then spent the next few years panicking about it.

When the correction came, entry-level hiring was the first casualty. Those roles didn't just pause — many of them got handed to AI, automated out of existence, or folded into someone else's job description without the title change or the raise. The latter is not new practice. They've been doing it since the 80s.

Two Robots Ghosting Each Other on Your Behalf

I've never been a fan of the absurd. Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill for eternity makes me want to go over and yell at him until he puts it down.

Alice in Wonderland's Mad Tea Parties make me madder than the Mad Hatter and Salvador Dali's clocks melting in the desert are an insult to my no-nonsense personality.

Absurdity has its place in philosophy, literature, and art, but the moment we bring it into the real world, the absurd is useless, distasteful, and a massive waste of time.

Like the experience paradox: an entry-level job posting that requires ten years of experience in a software that has only existed for three years. Or the dialogue of the ghosting robots.

The job market is being filtered by AI on both ends. Job seekers use AI to write resumes. Those resumes get scanned and rejected by Applicant Tracking Systems before a human ever reads them — 98% of Fortune 500 companies use one.

So you've got artificial intelligence writing applications to be rejected by other artificial intelligence, while a real human being sits somewhere in the middle wondering why they haven't heard back. It's two robots ghosting each other on your behalf.

And speaking of ghosting — nearly 1 in 3 employers admit to posting job listings with no intention of actually hiring anyone, according to a 2025 Clarify Capital study.

Ghost jobs. Listings that exist to farm data, make the company look like it's growing, or give overworked managers the feeling that help is theoretically on the way.

The (bad) joke is that job seekers spend real hours crafting real applications for fake opportunities, while economists look at the 7.2 million open positions on paper and wonder why the labor market feels so frozen.

It feels frozen because it is.

The Deal Is Gone

The traditional deal of entry-level work was simple: you showed up with potential, the company trained you, you did the boring work while learning, and eventually you moved up.

That deal is gone now.

The learning curve itself is being automated — the note-taking, the code generation, the first drafts, the financial modeling — all the grunt work that used to teach you something while you did it.

Remember how Mr. Miyagi made Daniel sand the floor for hours to build the muscle memory he needed for the fight? No? Too young for Karate Kid? Well that's your loss, hope you're not young enough to be looking for an entry level job in this market.

Companies no longer have a financial incentive to be your Mr. Miyagi and pay for your ramp-up period. So they just don't.

What they want instead is someone who already knows how to supervise the AI doing that work, which is an entirely different skill set that no one taught anyone, because the whole thing happened in about eighteen months.

This isn't exclusively an AI story. The broader hiring market has slowed. Nearly every sector saw year-over-year declines in job postings through 2025, and junior roles fell alongside everything else.

The entry-level squeeze is partly AI, partly a post-pandemic correction, and partly companies being cautious in a climate of tariffs, inflation, and general economic anxiety. Young workers just happen to be the ones absorbing most of the impact.

So Is It Even Worth It?

My honest answer is: no, it's not. Not worth it the old way, anyhow. I wanted to be straight with you instead of serving you the LinkedIn-style pep talk about hustle and resilience that everyone else gives.

The honest answer is: the front door is broken. Applying cold on Indeed or LinkedIn for entry-level roles is a low-probability activity that will mostly teach you what rejection at scale feels like.

Employee referrals and internal networks fill most positions before they ever go public. If you're only using job boards, you're competing for what's left — with thousands of other people, filtered by an algorithm that doesn't know you exist.

The roles that are actually growing — healthcare, infrastructure, AI-adjacent work, skilled trades — are mostly not the ones that show up on the corporate career ladder we all knew about.

Healthcare entry-level postings rose 13 percentage points even as tech postings collapsed.

Electricians who understand EV systems are in demand.

People who can manage AI workflows, audit AI outputs, and bridge between technical teams and real humans are being hired right now, even if nobody's figured out what to call that job yet.

My guess is my friend has a strong chance at getting hired to do what she's good at: do the talking for the ones who can't. The people who fired her did it because they have no idea what's going on in the market either.

The credential that used to matter — the degree, the internship, the right school — matters less than it did. 81% of employers adopted skills-based hiring in 2024, up from 56% two years earlier.

That's a structural shift in what companies say they're buying. Whether it's fully true in practice is a separate question, but the direction is clear.

Some people are doing the math and concluding that starting something of their own — freelancing, their own business, building an audience, offering a service — makes more sense than spending six months applying to ghost jobs.

It's also not easy, and anyone selling it as a clean escape route is probably making money on the course they want you to buy. But it's a legitimate calculation, and more people are making it.

I'm one of those people and I started well before the job market became what it is now. It paid out, it's been the best decision I've ever made, but also the most difficult.

It's definitely not for everybody, but the new job market is not for most people either.

The Ladder Broke and Now You Have to Build Your Own

The entry-level job market, as it existed from roughly 1980 to 2020, is done. That version where you showed up with a degree, got trained, climbed a ladder that went somewhere, that's not coming back.

What's replacing it is messier, less legible, and genuinely harder to navigate without either money, connections, or the willingness to build credentials outside of a traditional employer relationship.

That's a real loss, and it should be called out clearly instead of dressing it up as opportunity.

Let's be honest here: who among the many young people entering the job market now can afford to do an endless unpaid internship for some hot shot celebrity, hoping to get noticed and enter the business one day? Nepo babies, that's who.

They're children of people with money, living off parental cash and can use their time to volunteer, network, smile pretty, and build relationships. Because the rest of us have to use that time to make the money we don't get from our yacht-owning parents.

My guess is — and correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're reading this article, you're probably not a nepo baby. You're just wondering where the hell this is going, while applying to 15 more jobs that may or may not exist.

But the game isn't over. It's just a different game that nobody knows how to play. Yet. The difficulty setting changed, the rules changed, and the entrance is through the back door now.

As for my friend who did the talking for people who can't, I have a feeling she's going to be fine. The market is a mess, but people who make complicated things make sense are never really out of a job for long.

Those who translate chaos into coherence always find their way in. They just have to find the door that's still open.