Author, Speaker, former Regional Chief Legal Officer & Company Secretary with international trade (anti-dumping), cross-border dispute resolution & transactional experience in IT, manufacturing and mining industries
"Mikael Rahmani, a senior at Boston University, checks all the boxes: extracurricular activities, good grades, internships. But as the clock ticks toward graduation, he’s struggling to find a job—despite applying to about 15 a week... Rahmani had a full-time offer from HP Inc., where he interned last summer, but he turned it down because he didn’t want to relocate to Houston. Now, he and other college seniors interviewed by Bloomberg News are grappling with a sluggish white-collar job market, where companies navigating an uncertain economy and higher interest-rates have pulled back on entry-level hiring. 'I’m seeing a little bit of a disconnect between my internship prospects last year versus my full-time prospects this year,' said Rahmani, who is studying finance and business analytics. The issues for new graduates started to pop up last May as layoffs in technology and finance soured their job prospects. And it’s gotten worse. Layoffs have mounted, and fewer employees have been quitting, leaving less room for new hires. University career-service centers say full-time recruitment is eerily quiet. More interns aren’t getting job offers. And start dates for some new hires have been delayed or even rescinded. It’s bad enough that University of Michigan alumni who graduated into the Great Recession were recently asked to speak to current students. To be sure, the overall labor market has proven resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes to quell inflation. The health care sector, for instance, has created more jobs. But growth in better-paying industries such as technology and financial services has been more uneven. Hiring in both sectors was down more than 20% in November compared to a year ago, according to data from LinkedIn, an employment-focused social media platform. 'When employers want to shrink down, the easiest way to do it is to freeze hiring. That doesn’t matter all that much to most employees who already have a job,' said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. 'So the impact mainly falls on new hires.' " Paulina Cachero and Francesca Maglione, Class of 2024 Can’t Land Jobs as Hiring in Tech, Finance Wanes—It’s harder to secure an entry-level role at prestigious firms in the US, leaving college seniors scrambling, Bloomberg, 13 December 2023, https://lnkd.in/grRanrDc