Colton Masi checked off every box in his quest to land a good job in the computer science industry after college.
The 23-year-old attended Drexel University, a Philadelphia school distinguished by its focus on real-life job experience. And he majored in software engineering, a discipline he had been hearing his whole life was synonymous with stable, high-paying work. It was all part of his plan to avoid the fate that befell so many millennials after the Great Recession.
“When I was 13, I was online all the time.” Colton told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “I was on Tumblr, and I was seeing a lot of these currently graduating young adults kind of talk about their struggles with the job market and getting themselves established…I was always like, ‘Oh no, I need to do something that’s going to get me a job.’”
So Masi took the advice offered by everyone from Joe Biden to Chris Bosh to Ashton Kutcher in that era: He learned to code.
But Masi graduated from Drexel this past June into a historically bad job market for entry-level computer science positions. Since then he’s applied to about 100 jobs — none have even offered an interview.
“It’s like, you do everything right; you follow the instructions, but the field changes,” Colton said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just: Keep it pushing until you find something.”
Masi’s situation is increasingly common for recent college graduates and others seeking to break into white-collar industries like computer science and marketing.
“I hear about a lot of rejection from job seekers,” Lindsay Ellis, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has been crunching the numbers on the entry-level job decline, told Noel King. “[The] market feels kind of stuck to a lot of people.”
Ellis talked to King about why big companies are planning on a future with far fewer entry-level employees, the wild lengths people are going to to find a job, and what career advice executives are giving their own kids.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
If I were to guess at what’s going on, I would say this must have something to do with AI. Is that it?
That’s a factor, and I think is layered on top of a bunch of other factors that have caused the white-collar market to slow considerably over the last few years.
You know, starting in maybe late 2022, early 2023, companies and hiring managers were really pumping the brakes in a lot of sectors. There were the tons of tech layoffs that started in ’23, but from inflation [and] geopolitical conflict, then the looming election and a lot of uncertainty — in terms of policy — [about] which way things were going to go. If a hiring manager is saying, “Hey, can we hold off on making this hire and maybe have a little bit more buffer in terms of headcount, in terms of payroll costs,” they might see how long they can last without making that hire.
And then you add in AI as a layer on top of all of this, and the calculation is totally different. I talked to James Hornick, who’s the chief growth officer at the Chicago-based recruiting firm Hirewell. And he told me that clients have all but stopped requesting entry-level staff. Those young grads were once in high demand, but their work is now a home run for AI.
We’re always trying to figure out what is data and what is anecdata. You can hear one story about someone who applied for three or four jobs a day for a month and got nothing, and that will be the thing that sticks in your brain forever.
But the unemployment rate in the US right now is around 4.2 percent, which is super low, right? Is there a tension between the one extreme story and the actual trend?
Behind that number, I think you’ll see a couple of other trends that suggest that the picture is a little bit more complicated.
Number one is sort of labor data on the time it takes to find a job. And there are two things that my colleagues and I have been looking at. One is for unemployed Americans, it now takes them on average 24 weeks to find a job after losing one, and that’s nearly a month longer than a year prior.
And the number of long-term unemployed Americans — that’s people who are unemployed for at least 27 weeks — that figure is now 1.8 million people a year. Prior, it was like 1.5 [million]. So that’s an uptick too.
The other factor here is you think about which sectors are hiring at the moment, [and] much of the jobs growth is coming from state and local government, or sectors like health care, social assistance, leisure and hospitality, construction. A white-collar project manager probably wouldn’t be qualified for a role in health care or might not be looking for a local government job in a different state. So I think it’s also a question of matching opportunity to skillset and how that goes.
The job application process for a long time has been: There’s maybe a portal and you submit your resume, or you send an email to a hiring manager. Is AI changing the way we apply for jobs?
Oh my god, you have no idea.
This has been a total fascination of mine. The job application process now in many ways can in my mind be described as a robot-versus-robot arms race, basically.
What you hear from applicants is that they are super frustrated with corporate hiring software, which for many years will scan an applicant’s resume and cover letter and basic details and sort of rank them based on their qualifications. And they feel like that artificial intelligence basically forces good people to slip through the cracks.
So in response, [applicants are] using AI of their own to craft cover letters and resumes, using the job description and their own stuff to basically incorporate all of the keywords, [to] show how they’re responding to specific job responsibilities. There are even tools, though, that scan the entire internet for potential jobs and then just spray out a candidate’s application in seconds.
The whole thing has left applicants and employers super irritated, because employers are totally — all of their portals are getting clogged up, and it’s really hard to tell who is actually interested versus who is using really good prompts or keywords. Applicants are really frustrated because they will look at a job posting on LinkedIn, and it’ll say how many people have applied, and it’s like, Shoot, I have no chance here. Should I even still do this? Then if they do put time into their application, they might get a rejection hours later or at 2 in the morning on a Sunday. It just feels super impersonal, and both sides of the table are really frustrated.
What are young people being told to do now? What are the options?
I’ve been asking executives the same question. I mean both from a [perspective of], what are you talking to universities about — because there’s a lot of correspondence between business and higher ed — but also, what are you telling your own kids?
I talked to the chief executive of a consulting firm in Ohio, and he basically said, I’m telling my kids to really focus on jobs that really require in-person or client-facing communication. One of his children is becoming a police officer, and he said, while AI will affect the way he does his job, nothing replaces those relationships that are forged face-to-face in a community.
And now, chief executives are talking openly about AI’s immense capabilities, and how those might lead to job cuts, even more so than [just] at the entry levels. I mean, you had executives at Amazon, JPMorgan in recent weeks saying that they expect their workforces to shrink considerably. The CEO of Ford said he expects AI will replace half of the white-collar workforce in the US. Those are figures that suggest that people in various roles, various experience levels, should expect significant disruption.
You have spent a lot of time, all over the country, talking to people who are really struggling. What do you think about how these folks — many of them young people — are going to deal with all this?
Many people feel quite low. It’s a really hard stretch, and it’s a hard time to be on the market, and I don’t want to sugarcoat that.
I talked to some people who say, what’s really helped me is to get outside, do some gardening, go for a run, go swimming. Swimming is great. You can’t really have your phone in your hand. I will say, though: A lot of them are spending a lot of money to be able to hopefully speed up this process and stand out to employers and potential employers.
I talked to one guy who said he spent $10,000 on basically a marketing firm that’s treating him as the product, to basically get his resume out there, make him a website, try and introduce him to hiring managers and people who might know of jobs that aren’t posted publicly.
So I think for some people, it helps when they can funnel their frustration into, I’m going to do this; I’m going to really push myself hard. Other people have been telling me, look, this is a marathon, not a sprint. I need to make sure I’m taking time outside of this hunt to really keep my mental health steady.
