Living in a city as overpopulated as New York, the job market is going to be more competitive, but at what point does it become a concern? As a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, I know I’m not the only one who’s been struggling to find a job. Submitting hundreds of online applications to attending multiple in-person interviews and still being ghosted by companies is beyond frustrating and my friends and classmates are in the same boat, so I’ve decided to do my research and determine what’s making it so hard for Gen Z to find jobs.
A recent survey from the staffing firm, Aerotek found that 70% of 1,500 employers claim that their current search is increasingly more difficult than their last, meaning that the standards and expectations they hold for new potential candidates are at an all-time high. On top of this, after the pandemic, many companies believed that a national recession was just around the corner and decided on holding back hiring efforts because they didn’t want to hire people just to end up laying them off.
What makes things even more frustrating is that since many companies aren’t hiring anymore, they’re recruitment teams aren’t growing any larger either, explaining why people are constantly left without responses or ghosted.
As well as companies not being as urgent in hiring workers anymore, many have made the hiring process more complex. One man by the name of Michael Cook who was interviewed by Time Magazine claimed that after getting laid off from a gaming company after working with them for a decade, he’d applied to hundreds of jobs since. One even making him go through 6 rounds of interviews as well as a project, only for him to once again, not recieve a job offer.
Personally, I believe that this is why Gen Z is so commonly referred to as the “generation that doesn’t want to work” as Whoopie Goldberg once stated. In a society where it’s so incredibly difficult to find a job, and with such unrealistically high standards, Gen Z is no longer worried about the dream job or finding something that fufills them, but being financially stable enough for the future and having a job that allows them to support themselves. It’s frustrating to be passionate about a job you can’t even get, but even harder to imagine a life unemployed.