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By the time Bella, 24, graduated from the College of Charleston last spring with a degree in psychology, she knew she didn’t want to be a psychologist. So, she started looking for any kind of job. “Sales, receptionist, food and beverage, anything!” she laughed. Bella’s been applying for positions since August. “Marketplace” did not use her full name because she’s concerned it could hurt her job prospects. She blocks out time for her search, spending up to four hours on job boards every day.
“They make it very easy to apply for jobs on there, you can just upload your resume and click apply,” she said. “But I think with that, these companies probably see a lot of people applying that way.” She’s applied for about 30 positions, but hasn’t landed an interview.
“It feels like a cycle to me, where I feel depressed because I don't have a job, and then I go and apply to some things, and then not hear back,” she said. “Then it just starts over — ‘Oh, I'm depressed because I don't have a job. Oh, I didn't hear back from them,’ and then it just kind of repeats itself.” Bella was caught up in a cooling job market in which employers aren’t laying many workers off, but they’re not hiring new ones either.
That’s hit young people hard. The unemployment rate in December among people aged 20 to 24 was 8.2%. That’s almost one percent higher than where it was a year ago, and also way above the unemployment rate of people in their prime working years between the ages of 25 to 54.
“Who is vulnerable to weak hiring? People that are coming into the workforce for the first time,” said economist Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute. “Whether they're high school graduates in their late teens, or associates degree completers in their very early 20s, or college grads — these groups have really gotten hammered.” Berger said it’s possible AI is taking some of these entry level jobs. But he thinks for the most part, employers are just sitting tight.
“This just hits people that need a job more than people that already have a job,” he said. “Who needs a job almost more than anybody else? Somebody who just finished school.”
That hit at the beginning of a career can create a scar that lasts a person’s whole life. UCLA economics professor Till von Wachter said that when young people enter the workforce during a recession, it takes more time for them to land in the right place. “It takes a while to find that good job, and then it takes a while to reaccumulate those skills, and you're just behind,” he said. That has knock-on effects. | 
