Straight talk on the job market, from the people building the system
Short, evidence-based reads on what's actually happening in hiring right now, and what to do about it.
Everyone’s using AI to write cover letters right now. Fine. It’s fast, and it’s usually pretty good. But AI can’t do the one thing that actually gets you…
Picture a student sitting across from her college career counselor. She’s done everything she was told to do: kept her GPA up, joined a few clubs, and gone…
A few years ago, a clean, error-free resume was the goal. It signaled effort and self-editing. That’s flipped. Most applicants now run their resume through AI before sending…
Deloitte released its fifteenth annual Gen Z and Millennial Survey in May, drawing on 22,595 respondents across 44 countries. The theme was progress on their own terms. The…
Associations Now ran a piece in June about how professional and trade associations can better serve young professionals. It was written for association executives, and it’s far more…
Coursera’s 2026 Micro-Credentials Impact Report surveyed 3,500 students, employers, and higher education leaders across seven countries. Inside Higher Ed covered the findings in June. The headline numbers are…
The Wall Street Journal reported this spring on a squeeze that every family with a college student should understand. Internships matter more than ever for landing a first…
Camille Manaois spent four months applying for jobs the normal way. LinkedIn, job boards, company websites, even a paid premium account. She got nothing back. So she bought…
Tracy Brower made a point in Forbes recently that runs against everything students assume about networking. Most new opportunities don’t come from your close friends. They come from…
When Harvard’s research on friendship and economic mobility came out, the obvious question was whether it was an American quirk. So a UK consortium including the Behavioural Insights…
A Strada report covered by Work Shift asked students a question we don’t ask nearly often enough. Not whether internships are worth doing, but what makes one valuable.…
Forbes ran a list of the five skills teenagers need for whatever comes after high school: entrepreneurial thinking, AI literacy, communication and public speaking, real-world problem solving, and…
In January, Abbott’s head of HR wrote a piece for Fortune that put the graduate readiness problem into three numbers. Nearly half of graduates say they feel unprepared…
A survey covered by WorkLife found that 63% of Gen Z workers have taken career advice directly from Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok. Nearly one in four (22%) have…
Here are the numbers, straight from a recent InterviewPal breakdown of the job search. The average corporate job posting draws roughly 250 applications. If your student is applying…
Researchers at Columbia and the National Bureau of Economic Research tracked 80,000 graduates from a large public university system. They wanted to know why low-income graduates earn less…
Students are taught how to get the informational interview, but almost never what to do after it. That’s like teaching a pilot to take off without teaching the…
Harvard economist Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team analyzed 21 billion Facebook friendships covering most American adults. They were looking for what actually predicts whether a kid…
The numbers say the opposite of what most students expect. A high GPA with no strategy loses to a lower GPA with a system every time.
Roughly a fifth of the listings students apply to were never going to be filled. Here's what separates a real opening from a posting that exists for other reasons.
Candidates referred by someone inside the company are ten times more likely to get hired. The reason has nothing to do with luck.