‘I’ve £90k in student debt – for what?’ Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout

AI isn’t just taking away entry-levels jobs, it’s helping thousands apply for the same job with almost the same CV

Susie, from Sheffield, was unemployed for nine months after she graduated with a PhD last year, despite having applied to more than 700 jobs.

“I assumed it wouldn’t be too hard to find a job [with three higher education qualifications],” she said. “However, I often spent a whole day applying for a job, tailoring my CV and cover letter, only to be rejected two minutes later with a comment saying my documents had been ‘carefully reviewed’. About 70% of jobs I didn’t hear back from at all, including some I had attended multiple rounds of interviews for.”

AI, Susie felt, had changed the graduate jobs landscape she experienced in one way in particular. “Thousands of people are applying to the same jobs now – on LinkedIn you can see the number of people who have pressed apply and often one hour after a job is posted hundreds of people have already [applied].”

In the end, Susie was offered a position paying under £30k, “which isn’t that much more than a PhD stipend after paying tax”.

Her struggles in securing her first graduate role will be familiar to hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK who have been navigating one of the toughest labour markets in recent history.

As employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, the number of entry-level jobs has reduced sharply since the advent of ChatGPT. As large graduate cohorts apply for increasingly scarce early career positions, the heavy use of AI in the recruitment process itself has made the job hunt nightmarish and Kafkaesque for university leavers across the country.

Martyna, a 23-year-old who will receive a master’s degree in English literature from the University of York this autumn, was among other graduate jobseekers who got in touch with the Guardian via a callout and has been searching for her first full-time job since the beginning of May.

“I’ve applied to about 150 entry-level jobs – in marketing, publishing, the civil service, charities, but also for retail and hospitality positions,” she said. “So far I’ve had five interviews, many almost instant rejections, plus ghosting. It makes me want to scream.

“Platforms use AI to search for key words. I have friends who have copied entire job descriptions, pasted them into the Word document, reduced the font, and turned the colour to white so AIs find the words they’re looking for. It feels dystopian.”

One of the few responses she has received so far was a rejection email explaining that 2,000 other people had applied for the role. “I feel very disheartened and, frankly, lied to,” Martyna said. “Both of my degrees seem useless. My parents came here from Poland, and I have £90,000 in student debt – for what?

“They told us: ‘If you don’t go to university, you could be working in McDonald’s.’ I went to university and applied to be a barista, and was rejected for lack of experience. I have considered going back to Poland.”

Various people who shared their frustrations said that, across a variety of sectors, job-specific experience, especially in customer-facing roles, was now valued a lot more by employers than an impressive degree.

“Jobs don’t care if you have a degree,” said Lucy, a 24-year-old from Lincolnshire who has been working part-time in support roles and at [the bakery chain] Greggs since graduating in 2022.

“I have a degree in visual communication and can’t get hired in the design industry, but my experience working in a college means I pretty much always get interviews for education-related roles. I’m frustrated that I essentially got a degree because I was told it was the only good option and now I’m finding that I would have been better off entering the workforce straight out of college.”

Lucy has just accepted a new full-time role on minimum wage in the residential care sector. “It’s the best I could get,” she said.

Willemien Schurer, 53, a mother from London whose two sons have recently graduated, was among a number of respondents who explained that jobseekers felt entirely unable to stand out, knowing that hundreds if not thousands of other applicants had almost identical CVs, and had likely produced very similar cover letters with the help of AI.

“[I’ve read in the news] that recruiters are bemoaning that so many applications fit the bill so precisely that they don’t know how to filter them,” Schurer said.

“If everyone ticks all the boxes, then how to discern whom to pick? Grade inflation [at school and university] has now followed people into the job market.”

Her older son, she said, had spent a “soul-destroying” five months applying for about 200 jobs unsuccessfully after he graduated with a maths degree from a top university. AI recruitment processes that make it nigh impossible for candidates to distinguish themselves from competitors without being screened out, Schurer felt, have placed an additional premium on personal connections.

“It appears that it’s back to who you know rather than what you know, and a whole load of luck,” she said, reflecting the concerns of various respondents.

“AI-generated resumes screened by AI HR software means [one’s success] is so much more dependent on networks and who you know,” agreed a business school professor from Sweden who wanted to stay anonymous. “But gen Z know fewer people in real life and depend on digital connections, which is not optimal.”

The job market his students were graduating into was “tough, and about to get tougher”, he predicted.

“While companies are using AI to reduce costs, students are using it for all uni work and to replace thinking, and are subsequently de-optimising themselves for future jobs.”

This sentiment was echoed by dozens of university lecturers from the UK and elsewhere, with many expressing grave concerns about the impact of AI on the university experience, warning that students were graduating without having acquired skills and knowledge they would have in the past because they were using AI to complete most coursework.

“Being able to write well and think coherently were basic requirements in most graduate jobs 10, 15 years ago,” said a senior recruitment professional at a large consultancy firm from London, speaking anonymously. “Now, they are emerging as basically elite skills. Almost nobody can do it. We see all the time that people with top degrees cannot summarise the contents of a document, cannot problem solve.

“Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.”

Various employers and professionals in HR and management positions shared that university leavers they encountered often struggled to speak on the phone or in meetings, take notes with a pen, relay messages precisely or complete written tasks without internet access.

“What people want to do and what they’re actually good at are simply often two very different things, and it feels as if schools and universities could be doing a much better job at communicating this,” said Tom, the CEO of an e-commerce logistics company in the south-east of England.

“But sadly, universities are now run like businesses. They sell dreams and young people buy them, and then often, when they re-emerge into the real world, it becomes a nightmare.”

Sanjay Balle, 26, from London, graduated from the Open University with a third-class PPE degree last summer and has been earning £700-£800 a month as a waiter on a zero-hours contract since.

“I’ve been applying for about 20 entry-level and graduate roles a day and have racked up well over 500 applications – in advertising, healthcare, procurement, education, financial services and the civil service,” he said.

Given the AI revolution in the job market, helping employers cut costs and improve productivity, Balle suggested it was “no-brainer” that there are now fewer entry-level roles, and while people might look to the government to incentivise hiring, the huge cost made such an intervention unlikely.

“I think we need to encourage young people to explore other options apart from university, to pursue vocational paths and go into trades, but we also need to help university graduates like me. Otherwise, more and more graduates that are overqualified for their part-time jobs [will experience] a lack of social interaction and mental health issues.”

While most graduate jobseekers who got in touch were desperate to secure any full-time job, several expressed profound disappointment about the creeping realisation that they may struggle finding work in their chosen speciality.

“My biggest fear is never being able to get into the field I want to be in,” said Louise, 24, who graduated from the University of Oxford with a master’s in microbiology last year and applied to hundreds of jobs while working part-time at John Lewis before she was recently offered a graduate trainee position.

“There are very few jobs available for graduates, and entry-level jobs appear to be increasingly hiring experienced employees who also apply, making them less entry-level,” she said.

The employer that hired her, Louise added, had been more interested in whether she had customer service skills acquired in hospitality jobs than in her scientific work experience and qualifications.

“The job I’ve been offered is not using the skills I have,” she said. “I just want to use my degree.”