← The Sunday Note

The Bottom Rung Is Missing

You've been told to fix your resume. The problem is the economy you're handing it to.

June 7, 2026

The advice you get when you can’t find a job is almost always about you. Your resume is too long, or it’s too short. You’re applying to the wrong roles, or not enough of them, or too many. You should network more, or network better, or stop networking like that and start networking like this. The premise underneath all of it is that the door is open and you’re failing to walk through it correctly. I believed this for most of a year. I rewrote my resume the way other people rewrite their wills, with a sense that the document itself was the thing standing between me and a life. It wasn’t, and I want to talk about why, because the why turns out to matter more than any of the fixes.

Here is the part nobody framing your job hunt as a personal-improvement project wants to start with. The entry-level market is not soft right now in the way markets get soft and then recover. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York put recent-grad unemployment at 5.6% as of March 2026 (NY Fed), which doesn’t sound dramatic until you sit with the fact that, according to Oxford Economics, this is the first time in roughly 45 years of data that college grads have carried a higher unemployment rate than the workforce as a whole (CBS MoneyWatch). The same NY Fed tracker has underemployment for recent grads sitting around 41.5%, which is the polite figure for working a job that doesn’t require the degree you went into debt for. And entry-level job postings are down about 35% since January 2023, per the labor research firm Revelio Labs (CNBC). These are not vibes. They’re the conditions you’re applying into, and they were true before you sent a single application, which means they were never going to be fixed by a better cover letter.

What changed isn’t just the number of jobs. It’s the shape of the ladder. For a long time the entry-level job was, functionally, a school. You got hired to do the boring, legible, repetitive work, pulling the numbers, formatting the deck, reading the first draft of the contract, and in the course of doing it badly and then less badly you learned how the thing actually worked. The grunt work was the tuition. You paid it in tedium and you got, in exchange, the pattern recognition that eventually made you worth more than the grunt work. That rung is the one getting automated first, and it’s getting automated first for a specific reason. The work that defines an entry-level job, drafting the documents, building the decks, running the analyses, is built around exactly the tasks AI is learning to do, which is the case Brookings makes when it warns that automating those roles severs the pathway to senior expertise (Brookings). The junior work is the most legible and the most repetitive, which are exactly the qualities that make work easy to hand to a machine. Companies are quietly discovering they can skip the junior who used to do it. Hiring of new grads at the largest tech firms has fallen by more than half since before the pandemic, according to the venture firm SignalFire (Rest of World). What companies haven’t figured out, and what should worry them more than it does, is that the junior wasn’t just doing the task. The junior was becoming the senior. The current CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise started as a call center agent. The CEO of Walmart started unloading trucks on a summer shift (CNBC). Remove the rung those people stood on and you don’t just lose a year of cheap labor, you lose the mechanism by which a call center agent turns into someone who can run the company.

I went looking for this when I was in the middle of it, because the gap between what I was being told and what I was experiencing had gotten wide enough to fall into. I was a philosophy major, which is to say I was trained to notice when an argument’s premise is doing something sneaky, and the premise of nearly every piece of career advice I read was doing something sneaky. It assumed the system was working and you weren’t. It had to assume that, because the alternative, that the system is genuinely broken at the exact rung you’re standing on, doesn’t sell a course or a template or a forty-minute YouTube video about your morning routine. Despair doesn’t convert. So the advice quietly relocates the entire problem inside you, where it can be solved by purchasing something, and you, exhausted and applying into the void, are in no position to argue.

There’s a survey figure I keep coming back to, which is that something like 94% of Gen Z say they’ve followed viral career advice that turned out to be misleading or harmful (CPA Practice Advisor). It’s a number from a careers company, not the Federal Reserve, so hold it a little more loosely than the unemployment data. But I find it clarifying rather than depressing. It means the suspicion you already have, the low hum of this is nonsense that runs under every video telling you to manifest a recruiter, is not paranoia. You are part of a very large group of people who tried the thing, watched it not work, and were left wondering what was wrong with them. The answer, a lot of the time, is nothing. The advice was bad, and it was bad in a particular way: it was built for a market that no longer exists, sold by people whose own first jobs happened under conditions you will not get to enjoy. A Fortune piece from a few days ago put this better than I can (Fortune). The advice to job-hop your way up wasn’t a lie, exactly. It was describing a market that was real once and isn’t anymore.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where a certain kind of writer would pivot to telling you it’s all hopeless and the only honest move is to opt out, and I don’t believe that either. The market being broken is not the same as effort being pointless. It changes what effort is for. If the bottom rung is missing, the question stops being how do I climb the ladder faster and becomes how do I build something to stand on. That’s a different question, and most of the people stuck right now are stuck because they’re still answering the first one. I don’t have a clean answer to the second one yet. I’m a year out of grad school, not a decade, and anyone who tells you they’ve got the structural collapse of the entry-level economy fully figured out is selling you the same thing I’m telling you to be suspicious of.

What I do have is the thing I wish someone had said to me when I was rewriting my resume like it owed me money. It wasn’t you. The reason you can’t find the door isn’t that you’re knocking wrong. It’s that the room got rearranged while you were learning where the door used to be. That sounds bleak written out, but it didn’t feel bleak when I finally understood it. It felt like being let off the hook for a crime I didn’t commit. You can’t strategize your way out of a problem while you’re convinced the problem is your character. The first useful thing is to put that down.

I put mine down at a kitchen table, on a weekday afternoon, having just been rejected from a job I didn’t even want, and feeling the specific shame of being relieved about it. I remember thinking that the shame was the most useless thing in the room. It still is. We’ll get to what you build instead. For now it’s enough to stop apologizing for arriving at a party right as the music stopped.

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