New‑grad hiring cools
- The graduate labour market is cooling, with more new graduates creating profiles and finding job searches harder than before. - Indeed reports rising job‑seeker activity from graduates while employers keep payrolls steady and tighten new hiring. - That shift increases selectivity and raises the bar for candidates to show shipped software, observability, and security controls (Indeed Hiring Lab).
More college graduates are turning to Indeed as first-job searches get harder, a sign that entry-level hiring has cooled in the United States. (hiringlab.org) Indeed Hiring Lab said the share of bachelor’s degree recipients who created or updated an Indeed profile during their graduation year rose from 11.5% in 2023 to 15.1% in 2024 and 19.1% in 2025. Among master’s degree recipients, the share rose from 8.9% in 2023 to 14.4% in 2025. (hiringlab.org) The same report said the jump started in 2024 after years of slower growth, suggesting graduates were relying less on campus recruiting, internship conversions, and word of mouth. Instead, more of them moved onto open job platforms as employers grew more selective. (hiringlab.org) The broader labor market has not collapsed, but it has slowed into what Indeed economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” pattern. Indeed’s March 31 analysis of the February Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey said openings slipped to 6.9 million and the hires rate fell to 3.1%, the lowest since January 2011 and equal to the April 2020 pandemic low. (hiringlab.org) That slowdown has hit new graduates harder than workers who already have jobs. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said unemployment for recent college graduates rose to about 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 5.3% in the third quarter, while underemployment climbed to 42.5%, the highest since 2020. (newyorkfed.org) Indeed said the pain is not spread evenly across majors. Graduates in fields with structured pipelines such as clinical rotations, student teaching, and apprenticeships showed steadier Indeed activity, while fields that depend on open competition showed the sharpest rise in profile creation. (hiringlab.org) That pattern lines up with where hiring is weakest. Indeed’s 2026 U.S. Jobs and Hiring Trends report said healthcare accounted for almost three quarters of net job growth in 2025, while white-collar sectors including tech, media, and professional services stayed below pre-pandemic posting levels and faced longer time-to-hire and heavier candidate competition. (indeed.com) For computer science and other software-track graduates, the screen has gotten narrower. Indeed said employers now put more weight on proof that candidates have shipped production software and can explain observability tools that track system health and security controls that limit risk in live systems. (hiringlab.org) There is one countercurrent in the 2026 cycle. The National Association of Colleges and Employers said in its spring update that employers expect to hire 5.6% more new college graduates from the Class of 2026 than last year, after its November outlook had shown a flatter market. (naceweb.org) That leaves graduates entering a market with two truths at once: hiring plans have improved on paper, but recent graduates are still showing up in larger numbers on job boards because landing the first offer takes longer than it did two years ago. (naceweb.org) (hiringlab.org)
