Latest news with #jobhunt
News.com.au
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Nicole Kidman's niece begs for a job after ‘risky' move to London
Nicole Kidman's niece is on the job hunt after making a 'risky' move from Australia to London. Lucia Hawley begged for 'someone to hire [her] please' while describing her relocation via Substack on Monday, per Page Six. 'On paper, this is a totally stupid decision, and honestly, frightens me,' the 26-year-old wrote, explaining that she has a 'risk-averse' personality. 'My body quite literally rejects the idea of both moving overseas being unemployed,' she continued. However, Lucia admitted that she'd experienced a 'difficult' six months in her career while 'lack[ing] direction and fac[ing] numerous rejections in the pursuit of something better.' She wrote, 'This period was pretty taxing on my confidence, and I eventually began to feel like there was just simply not much left for me in Sydney (at least for now).' The former 7Bravo host, who is one of Kidman's sister Antonia Kidman's four children with late husband Angus Hawley, called the life change a 'traumatic' one. 'Saying goodbye to Henry was incredibly difficult,' Lucia wrote of her boyfriend. 'Sometimes I am left baffled by his unwavering support and blind belief in me, championing everything I do,' she gushed of her partner. 'This kind of love — true, safe love — makes you feel like you can do anything. 'Even harder were the goodbyes to my family,' Lucia continued. 'I kissed my little brothers through floods of tears.' Nonetheless, the choice remains 'exciting' and 'freeing' for Nicole's family member. 'I believe home to be a feeling,' she told readers. 'Having a strong network of people who support you is what truly enables you to navigate the world with confidence and self-assurance.' With loved ones backing her, 'failing can seem so much less inconsequential,' Lucia explained. She concluded by pointing out that 'if it all fails, [she will] always have home.' Lucia is close with her famous aunt, and they recently enjoyed a family vacation in Croatia.
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Gen Z men with college degrees now have the same unemployment rate as non-grads—a sign that the higher education payoff is dead
Gen Z is increasingly slamming their degrees as useless, and new research indicates there may be some truth when it comes to the job hunt. In fact, the unemployment rate of males aged 22 to 27 is roughly the same, whether or not they hold a degree. It comes as employers drop degree requirements and young men ditch corporate jobs for skilled trades. Gen Z is struggling to break into the entry-level job market—but young male college graduates may be hurting the most. The most recent data from the Federal Reserve indicates that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates is on the rise, at about 5.5%. Although it remains lower than the 6.9% rate among all young workers between 22 and 27 years old, men with a college degree now have roughly the same unemployment rate as young men who didn't go to college, according to an analysis of U.S. Current Population Survey data by the Financial Times. In comparison, around 2010, non-college-educated men experienced unemployment rates over 15%, whereas the rate among college graduates was closer to 7%. It's a stark sign that the job market boost once promised by a degree has all but vanished—and that employers care less about credentials than they once did, when hiring for entry-level roles. Young men and women are facing diverging employment rates While 7% of college-educated American men are unemployed, for women this drops to around 4%, according to the Financial Times analysis, and the growth in fields like healthcare are likely to credit. Over the next decade, healthcare occupations are projected to grow much faster than the rate for all occupations, translating to about 1.9 million openings each year—according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, the industry is largely considered to be among the safest from any sort of cyclical changes: 'Healthcare is a classic recession-resistant industry because medical care is always in demand,' Priya Rathod, career expert at Indeed, previously told Fortune. Men and women also tend to differ on whether they'd be willing to accept a job that doesn't quite fit into their career goals. 'Women tend to be more flexible in accepting job offers, even if they're not perfectly aligned with their career goals or are part-time or they are overqualified for,' Lewis Maleh, CEO of the global recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, previously told Fortune. 'Men, on the other hand, often hold out for roles that align more closely with their ideal career path or offer what they perceive as adequate compensation and status.' Gen Z men are skipping college—and turning to the skilled trade industry Many Gen Zers have learned the hard way about the challenges of today's job market. In fact, some 11% of all young people are considered NEET—meaning not in employment, education, or training. And while there are a myriad of reasons why they might have lost interest in work or education, for those who are college-educated, the struggles often come down to feeling hopeless after months—or years—on the job search. Young men in particular are especially seen as falling into this category of NEET. But some young people have seen the writing on the wall and decided to change paths. The overall share of young college students has declined by about 1.2 million between 2011 and 2022, according to Pew Research Center analysis. But this decline has a stark gender divide, with there being about 1 million fewer men and about 200,000 fewer women students. Part of this shift may be credited to the rise in skilled trade career paths—which tend to be male-dominated. Enrollment at two-year vocational public schools have increased by about 20% since 2020, a net increase of over 850,000 students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. It's a trend that even billionaires have suggested will be a growing part of the future. Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND bars and the newest judge on Shark Tank says that vocational careers, like being a carpenter or mechanic, are 'huge opportunities that pay really, really well.' 'Vocational training and learning how to be a carpenter or a mechanic or any of those jobs is a huge field with huge opportunities that pays really, really well,' Lubetzky told Fortune earlier this month. 'For those people that have great ideas or great opportunities and don't want to go to college, I don't think college is an end-all, be-all or required thing.' This story was originally featured on Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘I've £90k in student debt – for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
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.'
The Guardian
13-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘I've £90k in student debt – for what?' Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout
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.'
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Alberta's economy is expected to outperform this year, but young people are still struggling to find work
Taryn Leahy has been trying to find a job in Calgary for months and figures she has sent out 160 resumés since she started looking in January. It's been exhausting, she says, and demoralizing. She said her dream job would be working in a biology lab as a research assistant, putting the degree she earned at the University of Calgary last winter to good use. At this point, she'd settle for a part-time role as a receptionist, but even finding something like that is proving to be an overwhelming challenge. 'It doesn't feel too great to not be able to have a job, especially after putting in the effort to get a university degree,' she said. 'I feel like I'm not alone, though. I don't know if that makes it any more comforting, but I'm certainly not alone.' Gen-Zers across the country are up against a slump in hiring, but the job hunt is especially discouraging in Alberta, where the 15-to-24-year-old crowd is dealing with unusually high levels of unemployment. The jobless rate for this group was the highest in the country for much of the spring, hitting 17.2 per cent in both April and May. Things improved in June, with the rate falling to 16.4 per cent, still the second-highest in Canada, next to Newfoundland and Labrador, Statistics Canada said Friday. It might be comforting to know other Canadians are also feeling cheated out of a first crack at the workforce. But it doesn't put cash in Leahy's pocket, nor does it add crucial lines to her resumé. Her generation is caught up in a world of paradoxes. Alberta's economy is expected to be the country's top performer this year, according to some forecasts, and yet its younger workers are dealing with levels of unemployment they would typically see in a recession. Outside the pandemic, Alberta's job market hasn't been this bad for both men and women under 25 since the downturn of the early 1990s, according to Statistics Canada data. A mix of political and economic forces are working against them. Gen-Zers across Canada are feeling the effects of United States President Donald Trump's unpredictable trade policies, Mark Parsons, chief economist at ATB Financial, said. Employers are not hiring as much, worried the Trump administration could unleash a new round of tariffs at any moment, potentially derailing entire industries or perhaps slowing the global economy and the appetite for Canadian exports, he said. Entry-level positions are often among the first things to go when companies are reining in costs. Young people disproportionately bear the brunt of those cuts because they're new and inexperienced. But this alone doesn't fully explain why Leahy and people like her can't find a job. Parsons said young job seekers are also up against a lot more competition. Alberta remains the top destination for workers who are moving within Canada. These newcomers are overwhelmingly young families and youth. They're likely chasing the allure of more affordable housing, given that most of them are arriving from Ontario and British Columbia, which are the country's most expensive housing markets. 'You have young families coming here with their teenage kids or university-aged kids, and then you have a lot of young people coming here because of housing affordability advantages,' Parsons said. 'If people are chasing affordability, they might not be coming with a job. They might be coming into the labour market looking for work.' Companies in Alberta are still hiring young people, with overall employment for Gen Z up slightly in June from a year ago, but businesses are not hiring fast enough to keep pace with the influx of young people into the province. Leahy said she had thought that having a university degree would give her a leg up when applying for jobs, but she realizes it's not helping her stand out in an increasingly crowded labour market. 'The biology jobs that I'm looking at usually get 50 applicants a day, so I do look outside my field,' she said. 'There's a lot of admin jobs, but, unfortunately, I've only heard back once for an admin position.' After being ghosted by employers for months, Leahy is slowing down her job search. Maybe she can improve her resumé or dream up a new strategy with some downtime. The death of the summer job, and the troubles ahead for Canada Summer jobs for students: How to find work in B.C.'s tough job market Kate Han, an 18-year-old high school graduate, is feeling equally bummed about her chances of finding work in Alberta's largest city. She's been looking for anything that pays — fast food, retail, the Calgary Stampede — but she's not having any luck. 'There's no way people are looking at my resumé, especially since I don't have experience; there's no chance of me being considered because there are so many applicants for one job,' Han said, adding that some online postings attract hundreds or even thousands of responses. 'It just feels like I'm continuously getting rejected over and over again,' she said. • Email: rsouthwick@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
