Arthur Mayo has been out of work for months and has applied at dozens of brick-and-mortar businesses along bus routes and within walking distance of home. 

“I’m looking for literally anything,” he said. “I can’t even get on at the McDonald’s down the street … There’s just nothing at all.”

Gracie Chrisco spent the last year since graduating from the University of Missouri working at Starbucks while searching for a job as a naturalist, working in conservation or something related to her general agriculture degree. Interviews went well enough to inspire visions of life in a fitting new career, but she ultimately wasn’t selected.

“It felt like trying to hug a cloud,” Chrisco said. “It’s all fluffy and nice, but as soon as you go to wrap your arms around it, it’s gone.”

Emma Shoemaker is about to graduate from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with an accounting degree and is starting a master’s program to become a certified public accountant. But she has nearly given up hope of finding a temporary job after her internship and before starting a position in the fall. 

“It’s just rough out here,” Shoemaker said. 

Despite varying levels of experience and education, all three are under 24 years old and struggling to find work. They — and several other young adults who reached out to The Beacon — described an increasingly grueling job-search process with little to show for their efforts.

As graduation caps are about to fly skyward, breaking into the job market is like trying to climb a ladder with missing rungs. Not impossible, but structurally difficult.

On paper, a 4.3% unemployment rate looks healthy. Underneath it, the job market tells a different story.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 2026 saw monthly hiring at the same rate as in April 2020, the first full month of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that pace of hiring was the slowest since 2011. 

Slow hiring sends shudders down the career ladder, and young workers looking to launch careers feel it most.

Pending and recent graduates are as pessimistic as ever. Recent graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a degree at the highest rates in years. Young workers without a bachelor’s degree — roughly 60% of Kansas City workers don’t have a four-year degree — have an unemployment rate about double that of the general population.

Even more tellingly, the percentage of adults who are working or actively seeking jobs stood at 61.9% in March, down from a peak of 67.3% in early 2000.

Young people are still getting jobs locally — industries like health care and the trades are seeing growth. But current economic conditions mean businesses are being much more selective. The path into a career is currently narrower and longer, changing what it takes to get an “entry-level” job along the way. 

‘It’s rough out here’

Harry Brewer, a longtime local recruiter and managing director of the accounting and finance division with Morgan Hunter, says the broader job market has been a roller coaster.

“Since COVID it’s been a wild ride,” Brewer said. “In all my 29 years recruiting, this has been a wild five years.” 

In recent months, overall unemployment has been creeping up slowly but remains within the range that economists consider full employment. In a typical economy that would be a call for optimism for job seekers.

But this is no typical job market.

There are more reasons for economic uncertainty than there are barbecue joints in Kansas City. War(s), shifting immigration policy, the rise of artificial intelligence, compounding inflation, tariffs, interest rates, oil prices — pick your flavor.

“There’s just so much turmoil … companies in general don’t like uncertainty,” Brewer said. “It’s actually slowing down the hiring process.”

The collective effect of all that instability has meant businesses have a hard time planning ahead and are wary to invest in hiring new people.

People with gainful employment see that same uncertainty and are discouraged from taking the risk of leaving their current jobs.

So not many people are quitting, and businesses are hiring at a historically low pace. It’s what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” job market that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said means it’s tough for people to break into the workforce.

Frank Lenk, director of economic research for the Mid-America Regional Council, said Kansas City looked like it was in a “job-cession” in November 2025. He said the region wasn’t in a recession because unemployment is still low, but the local economy isn’t growing quickly enough to keep everyone employed.

Overall, the Kansas City regional economy lost 3,600 jobs in 2025. Lenk noted in his 2026 regional economic forecast that the area roughly mirrors national trends but doesn’t boom as high or bust as low.

“I expect when these numbers all settle out nationally, we will reflect that here locally,” Lenk told a local news station this month. “We’ll see that it’s a really tough job market.”

Low-hire cascade

Chrisco had an internship with the Missouri Department of Conservation and fell in love with the work. So after graduating in May 2025, she hoped to find a job as a naturalist, doing outdoor community education or something similar to start her career.

“Jobs in that field are kind of limited,” Chrisco said. “People tend to retire out of them.”

She expanded her search so she could pay the bills while pursuing her dream job. After a couple months she took a job at Starbucks making $15.25 an hour, a quarter over minimum wage.

“It’s a really hard choice,” Chrisco said. “It’s hard to say ‘I’m going to go out and do conservation as a career’ when you can’t afford to pay your bills.” 

Chrisco wasn’t alone. Nationally, 42.5% of recent college graduates are working in a job that doesn’t require a degree. That’s the highest level since October 2020.

After nearly a year of looking while working as a barista, she recently accepted a job doing administrative work. It’s not related to her original interest area but it’s stable work with better pay. She says she plans to put in volunteer hours in conservation to stay engaged with the field just in case something opens up later.

“My dreams of being a naturalist are on hold for the time being,” Chrisco said. “But I’m fortunate that I can put in some volunteer work doing the thing I’m very passionate about.” 

While many recent graduates are underemployed, a higher number are having a hard time finding work at all. Breaking a longtime trend, recent graduates now also have a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce.

“This has been the worst year for college hiring in 20 years,” said Chris Kuehl, economist and co-founder of Armada Corporate Intelligence. 

Kuehl and Brewer both told The Beacon that the current job market rewards specialization over generalization. Both said that skills are the most important thing for current employers, and specialization helps assure companies that you have the skills for a specific job. 

Kuehl said it’s one of the reasons that trades workers are having good employment outcomes.

“If someone’s trained to be a plumber, by God, when they get to work at a plumbing company they are doing plumbing work,” Kuehl said.

Kuehl noted a skills mismatch as a broad reason for slow hiring for generalists.

If generalists are currently having a tougher time finding a job, they add to the cascade of increased job competition. Young job seekers with a degree end up competing with those with less formal education for the same jobs. 

Young workers ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of 7.8% in December compared to 4.2% for the general working population. That’s the highest in five years.

Mayo, who briefly attended community college, said he’s competing for jobs with peers, but also with high school-aged workers and underemployed workers. He described applying and interviewing for a retail job, then seeing it filled by a father with multiple jobs. 

Mayo put in at least 50 applications while also tapping a network of friends and bypassing job search sites by pulling up Google maps and going directly to company websites. Mayo said if something doesn’t change soon he may have to move to anywhere there’s a job.

“We are all competing for the same (low-quality) jobs that don’t even pay us enough to live,” Mayo said. “We’re all fighting for scraps. We are fighting over old moldy bacon.” 

Entry level isn’t what it used to be

While hiring is frustratingly slow and young people are highly affected, some are still getting job offers. The process they are going through, however, is longer and begins earlier than ever.

Shoemaker will don a cap and gown this May, then continue her education online with Kansas State University. She has a full-time job offer pending finishing a program to become a certified public accountant. She’ll begin working with limited hours in the fall so she can complete certification. 

She identified accounting as her preferred path early and started applying for internships her sophomore year. She says she applied for at least 40 internships in her first round. The internship she’s completing in May had two interviews and a background check over a year and a half before her first day on the job. 

“It’s just getting in the door is the hardest part,” Shoemaker said, adding that she’s not sure why her resume got through with this employer. “I genuinely don’t know why they picked me out of all the applications. I think I just got lucky.” 

Brewer said that some HR departments and recruiters are overwhelmed by the number of applications they are seeing. He says job seekers need to find a way — like leveraging your personal network for a reference — to stand out. He said there are many factors involved but the sheer volume has contributed to slowing down the hiring process.

He said that in a typical job market, the hiring process takes two weeks to a month. During the hiring surge during the pandemic recovery people were sometimes hired within a week after one interview. But those days are gone.

“Now you’re seeing candidates who apply for jobs and they may not hear anything for a month,” Brewer said. “Then they’ll go through six or seven rounds of interviews, then find out they’re not the candidate for the job. That’s the part that’s frustrating, it’s time-consuming.”

Shoemaker says that early on she was applying scattershot at breakneck pace. She ultimately wants to do auditing work, but most positions require CPA certification. She began looking for related internships, jobs and general office work while she worked to finish her certification. 

She lined up a position with the promise of full-time work after certification. After that she switched to looking for something to bridge the monthslong gap between, with no luck so far.

“I still haven’t heard anything,” Shoemaker said. “Not even a ‘Hey, we’re not moving forward.’”

She says that she was able to speak with her employer and narrow the jobless gap to three months. But if she can’t find temporary work, she’ll rely on her savings that she feels lucky to have. 

Aymen Abbood is a computer science senior at UMKC, and he’s had four internships. He’s labored at stacking data science skills and has worked for some of the largest employers in the area. He says he saw the softening job market and the rapid changes in computer technology and he was eager to get a jump start.

“I had an internship at a bunch of different companies every single summer since high school,” said Abbood. “I knew about the brewing situation pretty quick, so I was pretty desperate to find stuff and build a resume.”

He says he has a job lined up on the path to working in cybersecurity, which was his ultimate goal. He dedicated time to practice interviews, realized that skills are what are valued in the field and focused there. Even then, he says he got one job by commiserating with someone in his network about the job market, then got an offer sent his way. 

“It’s very hard to differentiate what’s luck and what’s skill,” Abbood said. “I was very scared of just being unlucky.”