If you are unemployed, getting a job in 2025 may be one of the most stressful and frustrating experiences that you’ve ever encountered.

I have written repeatedly in the past how corporate and government hiring managers both have a “Goldilocks” problem with hiring, where excessive credentials and near-perfect credentials are needed to even get an interview, let alone snag the job. But what about young people, fresh out of high school or college, who don’t have any experience and minimal education to have a competitive edge in hiring? 

Last month, Teen Vogue magazine covered the employment nightmare young people are facing with a terrifying article that posed the question, “Why Does Getting a Job Feel Impossible Right Now?”

Sharing the experiences of multiple job seekers, including one who applied for 80 jobs but only got eight responses, the Teen Vogue article revealed how isolating and humiliating it can be to try one’s best and want to work, only to not be able to get a job.

Even if they get an interview, many people find themselves going through multiple rounds of follow-up interviews for basic jobs, as if they were pilots competing for admissions slots to get into a NASA astronaut training program. I saw a meme the other day on Instagram that said “The new Pope was elected in just two days! It shouldn’t take multiple rounds of interviews just to decide who gets hired to be an assistant to make the coffee!” 

I have the utmost sympathy for young people today, because they face a lot of unrealistic social pressure and outdated career expectations to get good grades, graduate, magically snag some kind of solvent career, get married, buy a house and live happily ever after. We may have called that “the American Dream” in times past, but it’s increasingly becoming an American Mirage in 2025.

As someone born in 1979, I can tell you that there are a lot of similarities between the situation Gen Zers — born between 1997 and 2012 — are facing in the job market to what GenXers like me — faced coming right out of college. This experience should inform policymakers and lawmakers alike to do everything they can to ease burdens for the next generation.

I graduated from high school in 1997, and at that time, we were four years fresh out of the end of the Cold War. A recession hit just as the Cold War had ended, and that resulted in many corporations downsizing, outsourcing and restructuring to remain viable. This is important for context, because while GenXers like me were growing up, we watched our parents and others have a predictable career pathway where one could start at the bottom of a company and work their way up to a middle or senior level job that paid well.

In the past, a company might have had one person to sweep the floor, one person to manage the file cabinet, one person to answer the phone and another person to manage them. If you graduated from high school and were especially precocious, you might have been able to get hired as the file clerk at age 18 but then in a few months end up becoming the office manager. Right around the time that I graduated from high school, this practice started to become unsustainable for businesses, and they’d end up outsourcing custodial services, firing the clerks and making one office manager do all the other jobs. 

Behold, the rise of “additional duties as required” and multiple specializations! To be that one office manager, you now had to have past experience sweeping floors, managing file cabinets and answering the phones. We didn’t immediately notice it, but a rug was slowly being pulled out from under our feet just as we were entering the job force.

And then, something we didn’t expect happened on Sept. 11, 2001. America was massively attacked on its soil by terrorists, and the effects of that day shook markets. Baby Boomers, then aged 37 to 55, ended up staying in their positions much longer, which blocked younger entry-level GenXers and created an experience trap where Boomers ended up hoarding all the institutional power and knowledge while not mentoring or training enough of their replacements.

Thanks to the education bubble, we also had millions of Gen Xers with similar bachelor’s degrees competing for fewer jobs. So what did they tell us? “Get three to five years of experience, then we’ll consider you.” But how could we get experience if no one would hire us?

My parents suggested to me that I work for the federal government, but I quickly found back then that federal hiring preferences put me in competition with veterans, making it impossible to get in, even when I exceeded the requirements for the jobs I applied for.

The decision to lower interest rates and cut income taxes to respond to 9/11 at the time created a spending spree for people already established in their career, while simultaneously blowing up speculative bubbles that would later make things much more expensive and harder to attain for Gen X and the first tranche of Millennials right behind us. Now, the situation became even worse where the youngest of Gen X and the oldest of Millennials were competing for the same jobs.

Now consider where we’re at in 2025. President Donald J. Trump started his term by laying off almost a quarter of a million federal employees with Department of Government Efficiency cuts, in the midst of a post-Covid job market that was already difficult to break into. This means that all those federal employees, many of whom were already overqualified for their positions, will now need private jobs, putting them in direct competition with private individuals who themselves were looking for jobs.

The Trump global tariffs, which add another layer of market instability, put a squeeze on small businesses and destabilize large corporations, meaning those will need to restructure (hire less!) to continue to provide somewhat affordable products and look out for their shareholders.

For Hawaiʻi, the situation is even worse, because we are dependent on tourism revenue and tariffs hurt us even more (go visit Ala Moana and Waikīkī this weekend, and count how many of the stores there provide imported goods subject to tariffs). 

As before, one more generation of young people gets thrown into a meat grinder, where everything depends on perfection and they’re forced to compete with people outside their educational and career peer group for jobs, housing and a little happiness.

Forget everything you know about “study hard and work hard and you’ll be noticed” or “create your own hustle.” We adults are doing that already. People in America are working harder and more efficiently than ever and we’re still suffering. But don’t tell that to the president and Congress. They plan to make you work even harder, and prove you’re worthy of basic social support services that were supposedly there to be a safety trampoline for all of us when we get down on our luck.  

As before, one more generation of young people gets thrown into a meat grinder, where everything depends on perfection and they’re forced to compete with people outside their educational and career peer group for jobs, housing and a little happiness.

States and counties are going to have to step up to save our young people. At present, the State of Hawaiʻi has a Unified Workforce Development Plan that is mandated by federal law, but its current report warns, “The exodus of Hawai‘i residents continue, and the labor situation will get more challenging in time if the status quo remains.”

“Beyond the gap in the ‘Living’ and Median wages in Hawai‘i,” the report goes on to say, “United Way’s ALICE report indicates that combined with those living below the Federal Poverty Level, 41% of Hawai‘i’s households cannot achieve a sustainable income and cannot afford the basics of living in Hawai‘i. That number is growing.”

Current workforce development in Hawaiʻi already includes a number of career preparation activities and occupational training for multiple industries. The Legislature also received this last session reports from the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations on statewide actions taken to insulate workers from layoffs, unemployment and job development. 

In particular, Title I (Adult, Dislocated Worker and Youth) services have been doing exceptionally well. But in spite of all our efforts, we are still not yet prepared for what U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has characterized as “a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks.”

Because the Fed has the dual mandate of seeking maximum employment and price stability, we need to worry when Powell starts speaking this way, because it’s a form of self-handicapping that suggests if things continue as they are, he may not be able to meet one or both targets. That means states and local governments are going to have to be aggressive in picking up the slack, especially for the youngest generation.

Government Can Step In

What would that look like? Well, it would begin by making the extraordinary policy shift of choosing to say that a north star value of our local government is to ensure that everyone who wants a job can get a job. 

Now before you roll your eyes we need to understand that neither Hawaiʻi nor America can afford to have a lost generation of young people who are jobless, hopeless and priced out of everything. Crime, domestic abuse, substance abuse and social order all are impacted by employment.

When I was in high school, our counselors were focused on ensuring we got a college acceptance before graduating. We may want to consider ensuring that students have a job before graduating, even if it means creating case managers to help refer high school graduates to employers that are actually looking to hire entry level positions.

Gov. Josh Green’s “Operation Hire Hawaiʻi,”which seeks to fill state vacancies, is a great program and an awesome initiative, but many of the positions offered are ideally for people who already have experience in the federal government or have significant education. We need a hiring program that can take people with no skills and minimal education and connect them with both public and private vacancies alike. 

We also may want to make effective use of practicum and work-study arrangements for people in high school and undergraduate education, where they begin to get hands-on skills, experience and networking opportunities before even graduating. We need to eliminate the excuses for not hiring young people and get them stable.

I credit our state and local governments with doing a lot already to uplift struggling young people, but we’re at the point where our best still isn’t good enough. We are on the verge of another major upheaval and paradigm shift for young people, and if a burned out, 46-year-old GenXer with arthritis can offer any advice, it’s that we should move heaven and earth to make sure that the next generation gets more help than we did.