Neo Institute Europa

Collage of rejection emails © Neo Institute Europa (Dec, 2025)

A Broken System

“How can you not find an entry-level job with this CV? It makes no sense” is a phrase a number of young people today hear on a frequent basis. Many of these people have master’s degrees, multiple languages, certifications, volunteering experiences and multiple internships yet they are struggling to find their first break-through entry-level role. After all, unless you are one of the lucky few, most people have to work to live, yet lately, it feels like they are not even being allowed to.

Entry level job postings have declined 29% since January 2024, while senior level postings have stabilised or even grown in some sectors. Adding to this, it is increasingly common to see entry-level roles advertised with requirements of three to four years of prior experience, a long list of technical skills, and even previous leadership or project-management responsibilities. For new graduates, this creates a vicious cycle: They are told they need experience to get a job, but they need a job to get experience, so they end up cycling through a series of short, poorly paid or even unpaid internships that rarely lead to stable employment. Instead of a genuine introduction into the labour market, internships become a holding pattern where many young people do real work without the contract, pay or security that older colleagues enjoy. In practice, the only true entry-level aspect of many of these jobs is the salary. Expectations and responsibilities have crept upwards, while pay, stability and career prospects have not followed. As a result of this, many of these Gen Z applicants feel held back by barriers outside of their control.

In the US, Private employers shed 32,000 jobs in November 2025. Not only did the private sector lose jobs overall, but the losses were widespread across multiple industries. Amazon announced its plan to lay off over 14,000 corporate workers worldwide in October 2025, yet insiders have mentioned to the Neo Institute Europa that many of their hiring positions remain listed as open. Despite knowing these roles won’t actually be filled soon, the companies keep them posted, leaving applicants to waste their time applying. These roles are now on the rise and are known as “ghost jobs”, they are kept open to collect CVs and information without actively hiring.

The situation is even more severe in Asia, where youth unemployment is worse than in other parts of the world. Many in China’s youth are “lying flat (tǎng píng 躺平)”, by taking a more relaxed approach to work rather than mindlessly working “996” schedule arrangements, which involves working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Governments’ surprise over low birth rates seems misplaced, given that young people with these work schedules have so little time or energy to build relationships or raise families. South Korea now faces a birth rate of 0.74, with a 2.1 being required to sustain population levels. This could inevitably lead to permanent recessions by the 2040s.

What is often ignored is that “lying flat” is not just laziness or rebellion, but a rational response to a system where hard work no longer guarantees a stable job, affordable housing or a dignified future. Young people are being asked to sacrifice their time for companies that do not offer them long-term security in return and would fire them without notice if profits do not meet expectations that quarter. Opting out of this system now serves as an almost subconscious form of silent protest. This results in an increasingly broken social contract where governments expect productivity and sustainable birth rates, yet offer new generations less foundations to start adult life.

In Europe, youth unemployment rates in some countries such as Spain trend around 27%. Although this figure is better than in 2015, it continues to push many young people to seek opportunities abroad. It is important to understand how these unemployment figures are calculated. They only measure those who are actively looking for work and available to start, and therefore exclude many young people in precarious situations: Students who want a job but are not officially registered as searching, young adults stuck in unpaid or symbolic internships, those cycling through temporary or on-call contracts with too few hours to live on, and those who have given up looking altogether after months of rejections. None of these young people count as “unemployed” in the statistics, even though they cannot build a stable life or plan their future. This narrow way of counting underestimates the true scale of youth economic insecurity and quietly depreciates the value of an entire generation that is trying, and often failing, to secure decent and stable employment as they enter adult life.

Younger cohorts were hit disproportionately by the 2008–09 financial crisis and the eurozone crisis. For many young people, COVID-19 meant sacrificing some of the most important years of their education, social life and early careers to lockdowns and restrictions aimed primarily at safeguarding older generations. At the same time, loose monetary policy and booming asset markets helped many older, asset-rich households become even wealthier. In that sense, the pandemic acted as a massive intergenerational wealth transfer from the young to the old with assets.

These problems are worsened by cost-of-living issues many people endure around Europe and the world at large. Food prices were about 41% higher in May 2023 than in 2015. Incomes of older working-age people have grown faster than those of young people across high-income countries over recent decades. At the same time, chief executive officers (CEOs) of Europe’s leading companies earned around 110 times more than the typical EU worker in 2023. The median CEO remuneration at Europe’s top 100 companies, including salaries and bonuses, was about €4.15 million, compared to an average EU worker’s salary of roughly €37,863. A rise in rents, food or energy bills that is not noticeable for somebody earning millions can completely erode the disposable income of an average worker, making these increases far more visible and painful on many levels than at the very top.

For young people, this combination is especially damaging; they face higher prices for basic necessities, slower wage growth, less entry-level openings and far less security than older cohorts, all while watching executive pay and corporate profits reach new records year after year. It sends a clear signal that their efforts, education and adaptability are undervalued in an economy that can absorb higher living costs without denting multi-million-euro yearly pay packages for a few, but cannot provide stable starting salaries and affordable housing for many.

The housing market has also disillusioned many Europeans in the last 10 years, making owning, or even moving out from their family home and renting a house seem like a dream for many. From 2013 to 2023, rents skyrocketed 50% to 100% in many major cities, such as Lisbon, Dublin, Budapest, Berlin and Luxembourg. Households where the oldest member is 25–34 spend on average 14 percentage points more of their disposable income on rent/mortgage than households where the oldest member is 65+.

A key way to make housing more accessible is to, ironically, increase the supply. Since housing policy lies primarily within national competence, EU Member States should streamline building permits and increase targeted investment in affordable housing, with specific schemes for young people. At the EU level, it should provide guidance and financial support through its social and cohesion policy instruments, in order to facilitate labour mobility and sustainable living conditions across Member States.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that AI has certainly played a role in this current job market. Now, 41% of organisations expect to reduce their workforce by 2030 because of it. This has largely affected entry-level workers, as a number of the tasks they do can be automated with AI. In recent years many more people in Gen Z are increasingly drawn to blue-collar fields of work due to their stability and pay during the current job market changes. Adding to this, increased debates and theories of an AI bubble do not reassure young graduates waiting to start their careers, especially so when AI skills in the workforce are constantly being pushed. If this supposed AI bubble were to burst, the market could swing from hype to hesitation, leaving young professionals having to adapt yet again to a new set of expectations.

The ‘Waiting Room’

Those who eventually decide to give up on the active search do not stop wanting a future. They simply reach a point where they can no longer bear the constant stream of rejection emails, especially when those rejections come with no explanation, feedback and no path for improvement. Many drift into a strange place of limbo. It is a paradigm where they just exist. Nothing more, nothing less. Life becomes a succession of days that feel like the same day repeated, with time measured not by progress, but by the number of “We regret to inform you” messages in their email inbox.

From time to time, waves of motivation appear. In that brief window they update their CV, write new personalised cover letters and send a handful of cold emails to people who will probably never answer. They upload their documents into another application portal, tick the boxes, agree to privacy policies and press submit. Then everything disappears behind the curtain of an applicant tracking system that filters, ranks and rejects at a scale that no human recruiter could match. For many candidates, the first reply they receive is already the end of the process. An automatic rejection sent in seconds by a system that never considered them due to a certain set of rejection parameters like visa status or entry-level years of experience.

In theory, candidates may ask for feedback. In practice, even that minimal form of human interaction often does not arrive. Some receive a generic copy paste message that communicates nothing concrete, just rejection. Others hear nothing at all and slowly internalise the silence as a verdict on their personal value. The absence of specific feedback means there is nothing to adjust and consequently nothing to learn from.

Over time, this scenario feels like sitting in a waiting room with no clock and no door. People in this space are not necessarily lazy and they are not unambitious. They are exhausted. They exist in a suspended state where they are told to keep trying, to keep applying, to stay positive, but where every interaction with the system teaches them that their effort does not matter. The ‘waiting room’ is not an individual failure. It is the predictable outcome of a recruitment culture that treats candidates as data points rather than people. So, what are their options?

Entrepreneurship and Taking Back Some Agency

Although AI’s rapid rise has fuelled concerns about job security and displacement, it has simultaneously lowered the barriers to entrepreneurship more than ever before. 50% of Gen Z respondents in the US aspired to become an entrepreneur or start their own business. Many young people look at the current traditional workforce and are dissatisfied with its state. They would like more agency, flexibility and some wish to make a difference in the world. Adding to this, many people in Gen Z do not want to ‘wait’ for their chance to climb the corporate ladder. If they see themselves as capable of achieving more, why should they have to wait for somebody else’s approval to take that next step?

While many people find themselves in this figurative ‘waiting room’, it is important their time is put to use, that they learn and maybe even build something they can later be proud of. Doing administrative streams of applications and cold outreach on a daily basis could potentially be a waste at large for societies if they are inefficient and minimal results come from them. Having the time and chance to build an idea or project from the ground-up is generally recommended when looking for jobs due to the skills and mindset gained from these endeavours. Of course, the ability to pursue such projects depends on having the time and resources to do so, which not all young people can count on if there are living expenses that need to be paid.

“Do Not Worry, Something Will Come Eventually”

Although this phrase is repeated a lot to people seeking entry-level employment, it still reigns true. Labour markets move slowly. People do get hired. Careers do eventually begin.

Do not spend all your waking hours on applications. Sending out CV after CV for eight hours a day does not equate eight hours of actual opportunity in today’s world. There is a very real chance that many of those applications will never be read by a human. Some will be filtered out automatically within seconds. Others will vanish into portals for positions that were already filled internally or never really existed as they were ‘ghost jobs’.

Yet, continue to apply. The opportunities are still there. If you never submit applications, never reach out to people and never show up in the spaces where opportunities circulate, your chances of landing an entry-level role drop dramatically. The goal is not to abandon the search, but to change the way you relate to it. Treat applications, networking and cold emails as one part of your life, not the whole of it. Give them a set number of hours per week, approach them with intention, and then consciously step away.

Hobbies, side projects and activities that you genuinely enjoy are not a distraction from “real life”. They are real. Volunteering, learning a new skill, joining a local group, making art, coding a small tool, starting a tiny online project, caring for others, even simply moving your body and seeing friends all keep you connected to something other than the verdict of a software or a person that quickly scanned your CV.

Keep sending a reasonable number of applications. Keep reaching out to people you admire. Keep showing up. But do not hand over your entire self-worth to a broken system. Something will probably come eventually, but you still exist as a human before that point and after it. Your time, your attention and your joy are not on hold until a contract arrives. They are already yours, and they deserve to be invested in things that give something back to you, even while you sit waiting in limbo for that opportunity.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Neo Institute Europa. The Neo Institute publishes contributions to foster informed public debate. While articles may be reviewed and edited, the author(s) remain solely responsible for the claims, interpretations and conclusions expressed. This content is provided for informational purposes. The Neo Institute Europa shall not be liable for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this article.