Survey Reveals How Much Job Hunting Actually Costs The 86% Of Gen Z Actively Looking For Work
The constant job search isn't just hitting Gen Z's mental health. It's hitting their wallets, too.
fizkes | Shutterstock It's no secret that the job market is chewing up many Gen Zers and spitting them out. The stories, not to mention the statistics, are everywhere. But while the mental impact of this is clear to anyone who's ever been out of work, there's another, more insidious ramification of this lengthy job search. It's hitting them in the wallet, too.
A new survey found that 86% of Gen Z is actively looking for work.
The data, compiled by small business loan platform Clarify Capital from a survey of 1,000 American workers along with an analysis of job search-related Google trends, looked at a wide range of ages and demographics in the American workforce. And unsurprisingly, what they found among Gen Z was pretty bracing.
What Clarify co-founder and CEO Michael Baynes called the "churn and burn job market" has resulted in a shocking 86% of Gen Z actively looking for work at the moment, either because their current job isn't sufficient or because they're not working at all.
And suffice it to say, that search is not going well: Sixty percent of Gen Zers said they'd given up midway through a job application process because it was either too time-consuming or too emotionally taxing, and 46% said they'd been hit with some kind of job search scam along the way.
But Gen Z also said it was often the increasing cost of the job search process that made them abandon ship midstream, which seems to point to wider trends.
Job seekers said the job search process has cost them at least $500 in various costs.
We tend to think of job searching as just sitting down at your kitchen table and firing off emails, but in our increasingly subscription-based economy, that's no longer the reality. Job searching is increasingly a money-losing activity, and people reported that the costs are quickly mounting.
Among Clarify's subjects, 1 in 10 said they'd spent at least $500 on their job search, including fees for subscription-based job search platforms (a thing the very existence of which is frankly preposterous, but that's the subject of a different article). Resume services and certification programs to bolster credentials also ranked high on the list of costs.
Vlada Karpovich | Pexels | Canva Pro
But not as high as the costs of actually interviewing, should you be lucky enough to land one. More than half said they'd spent gobs of money on clothing and grooming for interviews, and another 47% cited travel-related expenses as burning a hole in their wallet.
Between often having to live at home while looking for work, being in a take-what-you-can-get job market, and often facing unfair judgment in the workplace, it's easy to extrapolate that Gen Z are paying far more for all these things than their older counterparts. When you have to throw whatever you can at a job search just to get a foot in the door, the costs rack up fast.
This is all adding up to an incredible mental tax, but Gen Z is finding ways to fight back.
Job-searching is a nightmare in even the best of times, but these are not those. From the volatile economy to the rapidly increasing number of job search scams and more subtle rackets like "ghost jobs," the process is a recipe for a mental health disaster, and that's before we've even factored in that the process is actually costing them money they don't have.
Baynes, however, said the young people he and his team have spoken to are finding ways to navigate through this mess. He said that the fact that 49% of the age cohort have walked away from their job search empty-handed means they are getting scrappy to reinvent the process.
"Gen Z are bypassing broken application pipelines, using generative AI to optimize resumes, building personal brands on TikTok, and creating community-driven job leads in Discord Groups," he told us. He added that young people are also "moving beyond passive coping into a full-blown reengineering of what job hunting can look like in 2025," especially when it comes to using AI tools to streamline processes like resume honing.
And they're fighting fire with fire, too. Baynes said many Gen Zers are hitting back against employers' dishonest practices like "ghost jobs" and unfairly complicated application processes by networking with each other to expose them on social media.
It's still a dark landscape, but many Gen Zers are doing all they can to navigate it together in a collaborative way. "They're documenting the chaos, sharing rejection stories, and transforming emotional stress into content, solidarity, and influence," Baynes told us. "They aren’t waiting for the system to fix itself."
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
