Brutal grad jobs market

[anotherglass]

Hello, my DS 22 graduated last July with an BEng from a Russell Group uni. Since then he has applied for around 60-70 jobs with no success. The whole process of online assessment, video interview and then rejection / ghosting is starting to grind him down. It is even tough to secure a part-time job in our area - such as a coffee shop or retailer - as he is considered over qualified and a risk, due to the fact he is searching for a full-time role.
I am finding myself worrying more and more about his mental health and future.
He is already less enthusastic about applying for jobs.

Any suggestions on what to do from here? Is it worth considering a Masters to try and ride out the horrendous job market?

Thank you

My aim was to sift through a long pile of cvs and find confidence and capable candidates who will fit in with the team and be an asset to the company, not to feel bad for grads who lived in a jobs desert. Choosing candidates is a process of best guesses - of course it’s not “fair” - fair would be an impossible thing to achieve, you do the best with the information you have and judging someone incorrectly is inevitable. Without a doubt I will have rejected excellent candidates, just as I have green flagged poor candidates. That is the reality of the process - it is certainly not perfect - we just don’t have enough information to make it even close to being perfect. When we can accurately predict a candidate’s ability and attitude that will change - but that’s not going to happen.

What this thread shows is that everyone has their own pet prejudices - eg volunteering is virtue signalling and not serious work experience; McDonald’s is too vanilla; internships that don’t translate into long term employment mean there is something wrong with the person who did the internships; having several types of work experience/employment on your CV already shows nobody wants to keep you and you don’t know what you want; having only one employer for part time work throughout university means you lack broader experience and ambition and are a one-trick pony, etc, etc…. If someone’s CV is rejected without a chance of a face to face interview for any of the above reasons, that’s ridiculous.

DS1 graduated in 2020, unknown territory!
Luckily, he had done internships in his chosen field which helped him immensely.
I do remember his job seeking being a full-time job in itself!
DS2 is currently in his 1st year of Civil Engineering..NOT a Masters, which is worrying me, having read this thread and others.
He said he would like to do a year in industry which will hopefully help.

Hi, I don’t have any helpful job ideas but I wanted to say I remember my db graduating with a fantastic degree in maths in 1992.

Youth unemployment was 12%, we’d had the ERM eff up, recession nightmares in full throttle.

My db was insanely skilled as he’d been “that computer geek” at school and we just assumed he’d find work as those skills were much wanted but he is ND and struggled at interview to demonstrate his brilliance.

He sat around for an entire year, stuck - job applications dead ended or failed in interview. My db got more sluggish and uncooperative and basically lived on my mum’s sofa, he wasn’t seeing mates or doing anything.

My mum was in bits with worry. Eventually my mum and dad agreed to help him do an MSc in a computer coding course at the local ex-poly. Off the back of his MA project he found a job really quickly, relocated to London, and has been employed ever since earning a small fortune as a developer all over the world.

I just wanted to say that it’s possible to get through it - your dc might feel like they did all this work for nothing but there will be a time this horrible situation is behind him. Good luck

@mids2019 As you can see from the response to my query, some employers really won’t care. They might have diversity targets of course, but the challenges facing young people are not confined to diversity candidates. It can be poor and living in an area with little opportunity for internships or work, if it’s not on the application, it’s in the bin. Many candidates living in a city have a distinct advantage. They live where there are many more opportunities. So, if we take the selection process described at face value, anyone with opportunities on the doorstep, or rich parents, is considerably more likely to land a good job.

That's easy to say, and surmise about, but less easy to prove/justify, and a mumsnet thread will only ever give you gut feel and anecdotes.

Like in previous stages of life, parental involvement can help to mentor young people through potentially difficult times - you don't need to be rich or have connections to proof read applications, help with mock interviews, monitor job boards for opportunities etc..Some DC will knock back the offers of help, but others won't.

I've done a bit of the above with my two DC and it has certainly helped them.

I agree with you, apart from the last line. When jobs are advertised via Linkedin, Indeed etc, employers are getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications. Many use AI for the first sift, or get an agency or someone from HR to do it. They certainly can't interview everyone who is potentially qualified for the role, so gut feel plays its part.

@Walkaround It’s just been reported that Clifford Chance have retained 77% of their spring qualifying trainees. 38/50. So clearly the others are abject failures! Selection happens at many stages. No doubt all fought off hundreds, if not thousands, to get the training contracts there. It’s impossible to please everybody but too many are pleasing nobody.

That doesn’t stop “gut feel” being an idiot. Given the poor quality of customer service and general incompetence in pretty much every organisation I have had dealings with in the last year (whether banks, insurers, utility companies, mobile phone providers, transport providers, HMRC, etc, etc…), I have an incredibly low opinion of employers’ competence when selecting and training employees. As for the ludicrous number of computer assessed checks and tests before an applicant even gets to see a human being (with silly biases) in the recruitment process, I think AI is utterly incompetent at screening applicants, also. Something is definitely wrong when an increasingly ridiculous number of hoops for job applicants to jump through are resulting in absolutely no demonstrable improvement in the quality of candidates selected. An unreasonable amount of applicants’ time is being wasted by many employers’ extended recruitment procedures for nobody’s apparent gain, just a lot of bad will, ghosting and cynicism. And an employer deserves to be swamped by a lot of AI-generated applications by unserious applicants if they are going to hold applicants for jobs at arms’ length through multiple application stages using woefully inadequate AI screening tools and tests and then decide after all that to reject a candidate who had the stamina to survive all the AI crap just because they think McDonald’s is too vanilla or volunteering is nothing more than virtue signalling. I mean, ffs, why go on about people skills when the people doing the recruiting can’t even be bothered to employ actual humans to get seriously involved in the bulk of the recruitment process?

If it’s a summer internship? At the end of year 1 or 2?

That said, a parent who works in the field the young person is targeting will give a potential applicant a far better understanding of the reality of the work, workload, lifestyle implications, best situational judgement responses, things to be aware of and talk about at interview, skills and attributes to work on and experiences to gain that might confer an advantage and make them stand out, than the parent with no contacts and no relevant experience. It would be silly to pretend that if applying to law, or medicine, or accountancy, or engineering, or banking, or to work as a plumber, electrician, builder etc, etc, that there is no advantage to having a parent who does that work, so that the child has grown up around it and has an abundance of connections already, compared to someone whose parent has no such background, connections, knowledge, understanding or experience to offer.

I do agree, but I'd love to know what your suggested solution is when an employer gets hundreds/thousands of applicants for an entry level role, the vast majority of whom meet the minimum requirements of the job specification? In these circumstances, the candidates you cite are not being rejected because McDonalds is too vanilla or their charity work is virtue signalling, they are being rejected because other candidates have more interesting, relevant or impressive work experience that makes them stand out above the crowd.

This has always been true, and always will be, but all it means is that other young people and their parents need to work harder to find out about the profession of interest. It's never been easier to do that ... the internet is awash with information and advice for those that care to look for it. I've been able to massively help my DCs with information picked up from these threads, as well as from company/industry websites and job boards. Just my extra pair of eyes and ears has helped them both secure internships and (for DC1) a graduate job in fields that are very different to what me and DH do.

... and it works the other way too. Many parents who swanned through uni having fun, and then walked into a graduate job, have used their own life experience to give their own children out-of-date advice. Their children have often not had part time jobs, and haven't started engaging with their uni Careers departments or exploring options until their final year.

Ok - I'll give the example of what I see as virtue signalling.

Volunteer Work - Tidied the chairs and put them to the side of the hall every week for the wheelchair rugby team.
Or
Volunteer Work - Made cakes every week for the bake sale.

The charity aspect for these tasks is irrelevant - it's nice that you did that but I am not really that interested - we all do nice things for people (hopefully).

It's the skills you acquired or honed that is the important part. Don't focus on the charity - focus on the skills you acquired that the employer wants to know about.

Volunteering for the National Trust when you are interested in a career in real estate - would hopefully help you gain an insight into the challenges involved in looking after old buildings - or maybe it wouldn't, but you'd read around it so you could talk about it and give weight and evidence to your interest. More than just saying I'd like a career in real estate.

Make everything on your cv relevant to the job you are applying for.

Clearly the solution is to select friends and contacts of existing employees who can vouch for their mates. 😉🤣 For the rest of the vacancies, it’s to make it obvious to applicants that AI, not humans, is screening all their applications, and running the next three stages of the application process without any human input, and AI loves itself, so they might as well continue churning out AI-written CVs to all sorts of jobs they barely even want, because employers clearly don’t care about humans, and applicants don’t much like the employers, so one is as likely to not bother to turn up on their first day at work (because they accepted several jobs in the end) as the other is to ghost the serious applicants.

I find there something deeply offensive in an application process that doesn’t ever require in-person attendance for an interview. Employers bemoan the loss of people skills in the young, but, quite frankly, they started it when overseas call centres and chat bots replaced people despite the years of appalling and worsening customer service for real people that has resulted. We now have a society where the computer says no, humans are deliberately kept at arms length at every opportunity, the human employee makes no effort to look past the computer, and the business world that created that reality is now drowning in applications for shitty minimum wage jobs that most of the applicants don’t really want, but have used AI to help them pretend they’ve always had a passion for toilet cleaning and washing up.

No, in a world that thinks LLM AI is great, not encouraging people and businesses to be lazy and stupid, I don’t think I do have many solutions, unfortunately.

Yep, I get it, and healthy cynicism is fine if it helps DCs focus attention on tuning their applications to meet the zeitgeist. But if you speak to your young people about it in that bleak tone of woe they will be dragged into the pits of despair.

I was interviewing for a junior role at my workplace last week. It was a final panel interview (3 interviewers), which followed a screening interview (2 interviewers), a phonecall (from HR), and a first sift (usually done by HR, but on this occasion the hiring manager took an interest and quality-assured the sift). This is an organisation with around 20000 staff, but the role was for a junior specialist in a team of about 30. The role was only advertised on our own website, but was picked up and shared by web-scrapers. We got about 50 applicants - the last time they advertised via LinkedIn they got several hundred.

Of the 4 candidates I interviewed, all were fully capable of doing the role - they met all the criteria and had relevant experience - but the one we hired easily stood out as being warm and friendly, so they scored more highly on the "interpersonal skills" measure. The other 3 seemed more jaded - reeling off well practised answers with lots of content but in "delivery mode" rather than conversationally, and did not demonstrate so clearly that they really wanted this job - as opposed to any well paying job. Two of them also would have had a very expensive 2 hour commute into London which, while not being formally part of the criteria, is a bit of a red flag when we're trying to encourage (without mandating) team members to be in the office at least 2 days a week.

My point is that being jaded by the process, can be a barrier. So the more we can encourage our young people to remain bright eyed and positive the better.

So you have come up with two very poor examples to justify your earlier stated view - and wrongly said the charity element is irrelevant, when clearly it is not, as, eg, selling cakes for a profit requires different skills and motivations. What you have actually described is either a poorly written CV that just lists things of no obvious relevance rather than highlighting the reasons for them being on there, or a poorly designed application process that does not give the room for explanation of relevance until interview, and chucks out CVs for unfairly biased reasons before a candidate has been given the opportunity to get to that stage. To be a scout leader, for example, is to be a volunteer, and can demonstrate massively more maturity, responsibility, people skills, commitment and sticking power than to have worked in a coffee shop every Saturday, for example, but you tarred all voluntary work with the same brush, as though nobody would ever seriously volunteer years’ worth of their time for any reason other than to virtue signal, which is actually quite an offensive general standpoint. As for the National Trust, volunteering there can develop a huge range of skills and highlight a genuine interest in conservation, restoration, heritage, willingness to engage in physically hard work, people skills, presentation skills, etc. Yes, of course some voluntary work is nothing more than you would hope people would be willing to do from time to time, but your original point was far more generally negative towards volunteering than that.

Did he go to a state school, OP?

Haven't read the full thread so apologies if this has been mentioned aleeady.

My graduate DD joined the 93 percent club where state educated kids can get mentoring advice from professionals who also went through the state system. She found it really useful for looking over her covering letter, CV, interview tips etc.

She graduated last year and has been successful in getting a job.

Paid internship? I'm currently recruiting a couple of marketing interns. Money isn't great (£28k) but experience is amazing.

I do agree it doesn’t help for a job applicant to appear jaded, but unless by HR you actually mean AI, your recruitment process sounds refreshingly old-fashioned, and 50 applications is far from an overwhelming number to deal with.

I agree it's brutal but 60-70 applications in 7 months is really not very many - barely 2 a week. 4 should be the absolute minimum only if being combined with other training or upskilling to improve employability, with 6-8 if he's not doing anything important other than job applications and 10+ if he's actually determined. What has he done with his time since July other than these 2 applications a week? Is he showing potential employers that he's not one to sit around passively for a solution to appear but is always wanting to be up and doing things?

Quantity over quality, then - churn out those CVs.

If he's worth employing in a graduate role he can do that level of applications and make sure each one is high quality. If achieving that volume of work would require sacrificing quality then he shouldn't be in a graduate role. I suspect the trade off is not between quality and quantity but between job applications and Important Playstation/Xbox recreational-fantasy-murder time, if the young people I know are any guide.

@CactusSwoonedEnding We have friends whose dc has a masters in politics. They live in rural Suffolk but DS could drive and his grandad gave him an old car. He was applying for jobs locally for a year but got absolutely nothing. No responses from many and would have taken anything. He did cm time with a volunteering role to stay sane. After 1 year he got a job in London paying £27,000. He’s now progressing well and has been promoted but vast numbers of young people have this issue. They want to work but they are not given the chance.