Recent Grads Say AI Is Making It Impossible to Find a Job
"I feel helpless.
As debate rages over whether AI's effects on the job market are real or illusory, one thing is clear: recent college grads are stepping into a labor force that has already moved on without them.
In a poll conducted by Gallup over the final three months of 2025, 72 percent of respondents said it was a "bad time" to find a quality job. From December of last year to March, the labor force participation rate slipped from 62.4 percent to 61.9 percent — a half-point drop in three months. For context, it took the entire decade between 2012 and 2022 for that figure to fall 2.1 percent. The floor, in other words, is giving way faster than anyone expected.
This hollowing labor market is emerging alongside a tech sector consumed by AI automation. Whether the two are directly connected remains one of the defining arguments of the AI boom — but for the graduates caught in between, the overlap feels less like a coincidence and more like a verdict.
Gillian Frost knows the feeling well. A quantitative econ major finishing her final semester at Smith College in Massachusetts, the 22-year-old has been sending applications since September, mostly in silence.
"Every weekend, I dedicate over two hours to job applications," Frost told the Guardian. "As of today, I've applied to over 90 jobs. I've been ghosted by nearly 25 percent of them and rejected automatically from around 55 percent."
Ten interviews have come of it. Closure, rarely. "Many of them don't even bother to tell you you're not a good fit," she said. "I feel helpless… how do you prepare for a tight labor market coinciding with the emergence of AI and direct US involvement in war? Most generations have dealt with maybe one of these — but our generation is the first to deal with all three."
Even the act of applying has been reshaped by the technology graduates are competing against. A 25-year-old communications major from NYU, who asked to remain anonymous, described a job search that feels less like presenting yourself and more like solving a puzzle designed to filter you out.
"For every job, especially ones for larger entities who are likelier to use AI in the hiring process, it's essential to tailor my resume explicitly for that position and include as many keywords as possible," they told the Guardian. "It's aggravating and exhausting, but sadly a necessity in this f***ed-up market and point in technological development."
What gnaws at them isn't just the difficulty — it's the invisibility. "I hate that I have to worry about passing a machine's arbitrary and unknowable tests before anyone considers my human capability," they added, "and what I could bring to a given position as an individual."
These graduates are not passive. They are strategic, relentless, and burning through weekends chasing opportunities that largely do not answer back. Their struggle is not a failure of effort. It is the experience of knocking on doors that open for no one, of doing everything right in a system that has quietly stopped keeping score.