Snakes and ladders: Rolling the dice on finding a job you can keep

Floundering.

That is the word of the moment when it comes to the experience of the job market in the United Kingdom.

What can young people do? Apparently, we don’t know.

Unemployment is particularly acute among young people within the 18-24 age bracket, who have continued to face knock backs and are the victims of process that is inundated with often unseen obstacles.

The Race to The Bottom

For many, the process of doing job applications creates a supersession of quality, time and effort with pure volume. According to data put out by the OECD the average unemployment rate in the EU was 14.9% at the end of 2025.

The UK is doing a little better, with an average unemployment rate of 5.2% using data collected during the same period.

“It’s the unknown. The not knowing what comes after uni [-versity],” said Elicia D’Ambrosio, a 22-year-old final year politics and international studies undergraduate at the University of Warwick.

For Gen-Z, the feeling of knocking on doors and getting nothing back has become an inherent feature of applying, rather than a bug

Time and again people have attributed the problem to a lack of access for Gen-Z that they believe previous generations have been able to overcome. While some have questioned the tenacity of the generation and their ability to persevere after job rejections, others have said that the influx of AI has made authentic and genuine insights near impossible.

“Everyone is trying to get a foot on the ladder. There is too much that causes students to lose belief in themselves,” said Josh Shackleford, a 22-year-old graduate from the University of Sussex. “There’s so much content that will discourage students from doing what they want. I think that’s bad. I think students should have the resources to believe in themselves a bit more,” he added.

For Gen-Z, the feeling of knocking on doors and getting nothing back has become an inherent feature of applying, rather than a bug.

Something broken

What is clear is that at a certain point, the job market became broken with unemployment exceeding the growth in the job rate in the country. The combination of personal frustration and collective disillusionment have put the country on a dangerous path it may be difficult to row back from.

The unemployment rate for graduates at the start of their careers was 6% in 2025, well below the national rate for all young people which sat at 14.3%. Though, the felt sense is still that the labour market is unrelenting against favour and increased opportunities for incoming graduates.

Colleagues from Code

This is all compounded by the glaring question mark of AI in the workplace, both in filling job roles and in recruitment itself. The anxiety of not having anything upon graduation is real and inherently palpable for many incoming graduates.

“When I graduated, a lot of my friends weren’t able to find graduate jobs or internships,” said Anson Law, a 23-year-old recent graduate who works in London. “With AI replacing jobs, it’s made the small number of jobs there very competitive.”

Those now in the workplace said they wished they had had a clear strategy when starting out the ordeal of the job search

Law feels fortunate to have found a job in finance but knows that many of his good friends did not have this head start when it came to entering the workplace.

With AI having the potential to replace a lot of jobs in the production and service industries and the UK rapidly investing in automation technology, the picture for starter roles is a lot hazier than it has been in the past, particularly across recent years.

A solution

Strategy.

Speaking to people who do successfully make it through the maze of applications, it is one of the sole things that will set an incoming graduate apart.

Those now in the workplace said they wished they had had a clear strategy when starting out the ordeal of the job search.

As the rejections start to pile up and hope lulls, one of the most important things one can do is to keep putting one foot in front of another and to keep sending applications out. It is (however cliché) a numbers game. With 5.6 million 18–24-year-olds in the UK right now, all you can do is continue to be diligent and dedicate a certain number of hours and days a week to the search.

You never know when the role for you is around the corner.