As an individual who loves having her own money and not having to ask people for things, especially coming from a lower-class family that just “got by,” I had an ambitious mindset from a very young age. At just 8 years old, I wanted to start a business, and did at 12. I ran that business for about a year.
Later on, around 16, I realized I needed a quicker, more reliable source of income than trying to start my own business again, so that I could save for college and a car. So, I started applying for jobs.
Early on, I hadn’t yet heard how treacherous the job market is and how difficult it is to get hired, especially for Gen Z and teens. According to a 2025 Fortune article, nearly 60% of recent college graduates are having difficulty finding employment.
According to Heather Hennerich at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, approximately 52% of Gen Z college graduates are underemployed in their first year after graduation. According to the Talent Disrupted Report by the Strada Education Foundation, even 10 years after graduating from college, 45% of college graduates are underemployed.
According to the Pew Research Center, only 18% of Gen Z teens (ages 15 to 17) were employed in 2018, compared with 27% of Millennial teens in 2002 and 41% of Gen Xers in 1986. Among young adults ages 18 to 22, 62% of Gen Zers were employed in 2018, while higher shares of Millennials (71%) and Gen Xers (79%) were working at a comparable age.
Some reasons include AI, the need for experience to get hired, and mistrust of companies.
A key point about AI is made in CNBC’s article titled “AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It’s the end of the career ladder as we know it.” The data shows that postings for entry-level jobs in the U.S. overall have declined about 35% since January 2023, according to labor research firm Revelio Labs, with AI playing a significant role.
AI is seen as responsible for the 35% decline in entry-level job postings and availability since 2023. The job market is currently at its roughest since the pandemic, a period many sources refer to as the downfall of entry-level jobs for teens and the beginning of a cascade of events that led us to where we are now.
There’s also “The Experience Paradox.” This is the term for needing experience to get a job, but not being able to get experience without one. This has become especially frustrating for individuals applying for entry-level jobs, jobs where experience shouldn’t be required, and jobs where you get experience for jobs that actually need it.
Employers favor individuals with experience because of the illusion of risk reduction. Employers, in an effort to save time and money on training a new hire, slap the “x-amount of experience required” on a job application in an effort to filter out “less-qualified candidates” early on. The reason why the attempt to reduce risk using this method is an illusion is that studies have shown that hiring people with more technical experience in a specific field (strictly for entry-level postings) does not lessen the effort to prepare them to do the work the job requires. It would seem that employers are logically correct in preferring experience in the role, but some research suggests it doesn’t really matter.
Makiah Isom, a recent high school graduate of the class of 2025, decided not to pursue higher education and left high school with a desire to start work immediately after summer. His job search was long and tiresome. In particular, he commented on the differences in how job applications are online. So in turn, many, many more applications are coming in, and especially with large corporations, these applications are automated, filtering out early based on resume content and experience listed.
“When thinking of it in the case of an email inbox, employers are getting hundreds of those each week, and I feel like nobody was really checking for me, even if they said they were hiring,” says Isom.
He even tried showing face and popping up in person, but this is no longer the 1980s, when people, even teens, were hired on the spot.
When looking at the employer’s side of things, 1 in 10 avoid hiring Gen Z altogether, according to a survey conducted by resume.org, and the reasoning and blame for this is put on Gen Z. Employers report getting “ghosted” by even candidates who were offered the position, and that is one of the reasons why employers everywhere are now favoring older candidates.
Toledo Gilmore, a freshman at Morris Brown College, has been in the workforce since being a teen. He got lucky and had close connections at his school who directly referred him to a job that aligned with his intended career path at just 16, a job he still has to this day at 18. He comments on his situation after expressing his extreme gratitude for his fortune, assessing not just the state of the workforce right now but also that of the world.
“With the way the world is changing, American jobs are scarce,” he says. “Although the demand is going up, no one is hiring nearly as much as they were a few years ago, before we graduated. With new teenagers graduating every year and more deciding not to pursue college, some drop out that day and look for jobs, and I feel like it’s very stressful on the job economy.”
