Why Entry-Level Jobs Now Demand Years of Experience: The Shocking Reality for Recent Graduates

Lily Huynh / The Cougar

The Disappearing Entry-Level Path

In January, I applied to a technical writing internship through my university's career services website. The company expressed initial interest and sent the next steps in the application process.

This included a three-part personality test with a hundred questions like: would I prefer to assemble a drawer or play in a band? Am I very likely, neutral or unlikely to pick up money off the ground? I also had to complete a 45-minute test on pattern recognition and basic math and language skills.

I completed these tasks promptly and emailed the hiring manager, expressing my continued interest. She responded four days later: they weren't interested in an interview at that time. Two months later, the job application remains open.

Stories like these are common among students on the job hunt. Internship postings on Handshake, a popular employment website for students, declined by more than 15 percent between January 2023 and January 2025, while applications per internship have more than doubled in the past two years.

Reports show that only 30 percent of 2025 college graduates have found full-time jobs in their field, and it takes dozens of applications for most students to land even an internship.

The AI Takeover in Hiring

A major reason students and recent graduates have trouble getting noticed is the rise of artificial intelligence and applicant tracking systems that screen resumes. Computers are increasingly being used to scan resumes for specific keywords before they're passed to hiring managers.

This means qualified candidates must tailor their resumes to each job, or risk automatic rejection for minor wording differences.

This hyper-specific system, unsupervised by real people, significantly slows down the job-hunting process and makes mass applying ineffective.

This creates an unfair balance between employers and prospective employees; applicants must create highly personalized resumes and cover letters for each job, only to receive an automated rejection email, if they get an answer at all.

There's also the issue of "ghost jobs" – job openings listed as active that aren't actually hiring. Companies may list ghost jobs to create the illusion of growth, meet quotas or monitor competitors' wages.

According to Forbes, a whopping 30 percent of job postings in 2025 were fake. That's more than two million fake opportunities wasting people's time in an economy where people are already growing desperate.

The Hidden Biases of Hiring Managers

If you peek into the world of hiring managers on social media, you'll find a maze of conflicting advice. It's natural for recruiters to have different preferences as individuals.

However, there are a shocking number of arbitrary, unspoken rules irrelevant to the position that determine the jobseeker's success.

If you watch videos of hiring managers revealing what makes them decide not to hire someone, their standards range from reasonable professional expectations to more subjective critiques.

Some claim candidates answer questions too quickly, fail to use a unique enough verb to describe themselves, appear too confident or ask too many questions.

This means even if you get past the application process, the interview is more like a game of reading the recruiter's mind and performing the right gimmick rather than a legitimate search for the most qualified candidate.

The Personality Problem

One might argue that job interviews aren't only about the candidate's qualifications; the recruiter must also ensure the person fits the company's culture. It's true that people should be able to adapt their personalities to the workplace and know when and where certain behaviors are appropriate.

However, the willingness to jump through invisible hoops is not a good test of someone's personality, but only their level of desperation to get hired.

If a person is fundamentally polite and professionally qualified, they're perfectly capable of performing a job, even if they didn't describe themselves uniquely enough.

As of December 2025, 42.5 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. When people face rejection after rejection due to minute restrictions, they eventually have to resort to any job that pays the bills, and all the time and money poured into degrees becomes meaningless.

The machine and human bias in the entry-level hiring process needs to stop before Gen Z becomes the generation of mall Santas with PhDs.