Today’s job seekers are running headlong into a clogged system. Young people are flooding job boards with AI-generated résumés, and human-resources departments are using algorithms to filter them; the result, as Annie Lowrey writes, is “Tinderized job-search hell.”
Payroll growth has slowed; the hiring rate is at its lowest level since the recovery from the Great Recession; and the average job search now lasts about 10 weeks, Lowrey reports. One recent graduate applied to 200 positions—“I didn’t get rejected 200 times,” he clarified. “A lot of businesses never responded.”
For young workers, the challenges are especially acute. Derek Thompson noted in April that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates had climbed to 5.8 percent, and some economists believe AI could be starting to displace the very entry-level jobs that once helped new graduates build careers. Together, the picture is bleak: a labor market that feels frozen for applicants and jittery for employers, with many résumés disappearing into automated systems before a human ever sees them—leaving applicants stuck in what Lowrey calls a “late-capitalist nightmare.”
