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Even in the best of times, searching for a first job after college is an exercise in patience, resilience, and coping with rejection. And these are not the best of times. Companies have no idea which candidates to hire, applicants have no idea how to stand out, and everyone is miserable.
Historically, new college graduates were more likely to have a job than the average worker. Now, however, the recent-grad unemployment rate is slightly higher than that of the overall workforce. That’s in part because there are fewer positions to go around. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for college students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year, and companies are warning that this year’s entry-level job market could be even worse. (To be clear, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is still far lower than the rate for young people who didn’t go to college, and workers with a college degree continue to outearn those without.)
Another factor is making job hunting even grimmer: The hiring process is starting to break down. In the past, companies looking for fresh entry-level talent could rely on a college graduate’s GPA as a mark of their intelligence and work ethic. Hiring managers could assess a candidate’s cover letter and interview performance to get a sense of their writing and communication skills. Now those signals have lost much of their value. Rampant grade inflation has rendered GPAs almost meaningless. The widespread use of AI to write cover letters—and even to assist with job-interview performance—has robbed those assessments of their predictive power.
Two decades ago, fewer than a quarter of Harvard undergraduate grades were A’s. Today, 60 percent are. The trend holds across universities. A recent analysis of first-year courses at eight large public universities found that grades have been rising for more than a decade. (At the same time, standardized-test scores have fallen, suggesting that students aren’t simply getting smarter.) As the gap between grades and achievement has grown, companies are finding that transcripts are no longer a strong measure of student achievement. Blair Ciesil, a co-leader of talent attraction at McKinsey, told me that the consulting firm now looks at whether students studied one of the most challenging majors or earned a dual degree. Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, says that employers tell her that they struggle to tell different Harvard students apart. Seven years ago, 70 percent of new graduates’ résumés were screened by GPA, according to surveys by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Now that number is 40 percent.
At the same time, cover letters and writing samples have become less reliable evidence of applicants’ abilities. (As anyone who has ever written or read a cover letter knows, they were never a perfect measure of ability. But they at least helped recruiters distinguish between candidates.) Two recent working papers found that for applicants on Freelancer.com, a job site connecting freelancers with employers, cover-letter quality used to strongly predict who would get a job and how well they would perform. Then ChatGPT became available. “We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism,” Jesse Silbert, one of the researchers, told me. Julie Bedard, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group, told me that her clients report receiving more and more applications that reach a baseline level of quality, but they all sound the same. At least half of the companies she works with say that cover letters are no longer helpful in hiring. Many are eliminating them.
In addition to turning job applications into mush, AI also makes them far easier to produce. Submitting an application used to require at least some investment of time and effort, automatically screening out people who weren’t committed enough to go through the process. Now AI can complete one in seconds. The result is that companies are inundated with applications (some of which are surely submitted by AI bots). Handshake data show that the average number of applications per open job has increased by 26 percent in the past year. Some companies are taking down job postings after only a few days to limit the number of applicants. And because more people are competing for each job, recent graduates are forced to submit far more applications than they once did. Louise Jackson, director of the University of Michigan career center, told me that it used to be extreme for students to submit 100 applications. “We’re definitely past that number now,” she said. Students at UC Berkeley are applying to 150 internships just to get one or two interviews, Sue Harbour, the head of career engagement at the school, told me. The easier AI makes it to apply for a job, the harder it becomes to actually get one.
To handle the AI-driven influx of applications, employers have turned to—what else?—AI. LinkedIn recently launched a tool that allows recruiters to search profiles for specific skills and cull the irrelevant ones. Hari Srinivasan, a vice president of product management at LinkedIn, told me that this cuts the number of applications recruiters have to look at by 70 percent. “It’s a really weird wild west,” Kyle M. K., a senior talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. Job seekers are trying to create an application that will make it through the screening process, and recruiters are trying to limit the number of applications that make it through. “You’ve got two human beings trying to fight off the robot on the other side,” M. K. said. This has created something of an AI arms race as each party searches for any advantage.
Some companies are trying to sidestep that race by focusing more on measurable skills. Hirers at tech and consulting companies are adding more rounds of tests and trial projects (often in locked-down browsers to try to prevent applicants from using AI), focusing on prior internships, and looking at student extracurriculars. “I think most people who graduate from school feel the degree is their output,” Srinivasan, at LinkedIn, told me. “I would encourage them to think about the degree plus the work product.”
The rise of AI in the hiring process might be worth the costs if it were democratizing the hiring process, expanding opportunity to less privileged graduates. It is not. Shawn VanDerziel, the head of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, told me that in the absence of useful achievement metrics, many companies are ramping up recruitment efforts at their “target schools”—selective universities with alumni who have previously worked for the company. And personal referrals have come to matter more than ever, Zack Mabel, director of research at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. This approach might help companies find qualified candidates, but it further helps the applicants who are already the most privileged.
To any individual college graduate, having a high GPA and access to a magic application-writing machine makes finding a job dramatically easier. But the collective effect of grade inflation and chatbots has been precisely the opposite. That’s the thing about advantages: Sometimes, when everyone has them, they stop being advantageous.
