Low hiring has Gen-Z White Collar Jobs in Neutral

At a glance

• Gen Z hiring remained frozen in 2025, with an early Q3 slowdown extending a two-year freeze in white-collar opportunities.

• Professional services firms are still digesting the 2021–2022 hiring boom, limiting the number of new early-career openings.

• Finance offered only a brief summer rebound, likely driven by delayed promotions and backfilling rather than new growth.

• Tech continues to hire Gen Z at higher rates, fueled by demand for AI-native talent and rapid investment in AI development.

Introduction

Gen Z’s white-collar careers are running into a bottleneck: hiring for 20- to 28-year-olds continued to remain flat this year, leaving young professionals competing for a limited number of openings. With each new class of graduates entering a market that isn’t expanding, early-career workers are finding it harder to land roles that match their skills, or to move up once they’re in the door.

Overall Gen Z hiring is 22% lower in 2025 than in 2022

Hiring for 20- to 28-year-olds in professional roles stayed roughly flat, and the typical end-of-year slowdown arrived early, around the start of the third quarter, extending a labor market that’s been largely frozen for about two years. 

It remains significantly harder for young workers to land white-collar jobs than it was in 2022. With each new graduating class entering the market, the number of job seekers continues to grow, but the number of open roles has not. That imbalance is pushing up unemployment among recent graduates and making it tougher for early-career professionals to move into roles that match their education and skills. Some appear to be stepping out of the labor force altogether: the participation rate for 20- to 28-year-olds has fallen since April 2025. When those first rungs on the career ladder are missing, it can slow promotions, suppress wage growth, and ultimately reduce lifetime earnings.

Professional services muted hiring may be due to 2022 hiring boom

In general professional services, traditional white-collar fields outside finance and tech, hiring among Gen Z workers remained subdued in 2025. Many of these firms hired aggressively in 2021 and 2022, anticipating continued rapid growth. With that expansion wave behind them and today’s muted job-switching, they now have relatively low turnover and little need to backfill roles.

Instead of opening up new entry-level positions, many employers appear to be holding on to their existing headcount. For young workers, that means fewer opportunities to get a first foot in the door, or to move from an initial role into a better-fitting job as they build experience.

Gen Z finance hiring picked in 2025

The finance sector provided one of the few bright spots for Gen Z job seekers in 2025. Hiring for 20- to 28-year-olds picked up over the summer before easing back toward last year’s pace. Expectations for a stronger year, including more deal activity on Wall Street and increased financial planning and services work linked to tax-law changes, likely helped drive this short-term boost.

But even here, the story looks less like a breakout and more like a catch-up. After two years of constrained hiring across white-collar fields, the recent uptick appears to reflect delayed career progression finally moving forward. Small businesses seem to be filling long-paused openings or replacing talent lost to attrition, giving some early-career professionals their first real chance to advance rather than reshaping the overall demand for young workers.

AI development may be reshaping tech hiring

Technology stands out as the sector where Gen Z saw the strongest hiring since 2022. While hiring is much more muted than just a few years ago, Gen Z hiring peaked at over 10% this summer in the technology space. Much of that momentum appears tied to companies investing in AI development and deployment. Employers are looking for workers who can build AI tools or incorporate them into products and workflows, and they’re especially interested in “native-AI” users who are already comfortable with these tools, rather than employees who need extensive retraining.

That shift may be tilting tech hiring toward younger candidates, as businesses adapt their workforces to focus on AI skills and development. For Gen Z workers who can demonstrate those capabilities, tech offers a relatively rare pocket of opportunity in an otherwise tight white-collar market.

Methodology

This analysis focuses on workers aged 20 to 28 hired into FLSA-exempt roles.