Why entry-level jobs are so hard to find
Of the roles that state a level on a company careers page, the overwhelming majority ask for senior. Junior and intern are a rounding error.
Jobzyl3 min read
Figures on this page are current as of
If you are early in your career, the market feels like a door with no handle. Every posting wants three years you do not have. It is worth knowing whether that is a mood or a measurement, so we counted.
This reads 148,263 open roles across 985 company career pages. Not a survey, and not a sample of job boards: these are the entire boards of companies publishing on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and SmartRecruiters, pulled one company at a time with no search term. Within that set of companies, nothing in the mix below reflects what we went looking for.
Most postings do not state a level at all
Before any share of anything, the denominator.
37%
of postings state a level in the title
Read off the job title. A posting that gives its level only in the body counts here as unstated, so this is a floor.
Data as of
That leaves the majority silent. Some of those are genuinely open to a range of experience. Plenty are not, and simply put the requirement in the third paragraph instead of the title. Either way, everything below describes the minority that said so out loud, and it should not be read as a statement about the rest.
Of the ones that do, almost all want senior
Show the numbers
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| senior | 52.7% |
| director | 17.2% |
| lead | 12.0% |
| principal | 11.3% |
| intern | 3.7% |
| junior | 2.8% |
Data as of
Senior alone takes more than half. Add director, lead and principal and there is almost nothing left. Junior sits at 2.8% and intern at 3.7%.
The mid-level tier barely registers, and that says more about vocabulary than about hiring. Employers write "Senior Engineer" and they write "Engineering Intern". They almost never write "Mid-Level Engineer". The unmarked title is the mid-level title, which is why the silent majority above matters more than the shape of this chart does.
What this proves
A narrow thing, and a useful one for an actual job search: the seniority signal in a job title is nearly always a senior signal. It is not a count of how many jobs are closed to you, and reading it that way would overstate it badly, since the majority of postings carry no signal either way.
Searching on words like "junior", "graduate" or "entry level" is therefore searching a vocabulary that a small fraction of postings use, and it throws away the unmarked majority where your real chances are.
Searching for "junior data scientist" hides the postings most likely to take you. Search the role, then read the requirements.
There is a second reason the door feels shut, and it is a limit of this data rather than a finding. These are companies that publish on four modern applicant tracking systems, which skews toward technology and away from the public sector, from small employers and from the trades. Graduate schemes, apprenticeships and training contracts are concentrated in exactly the places this census cannot see. If that is your search, this chart is describing somebody else's market.
Where to look instead
Search the role rather than the level. Software engineer roles in the United Kingdom and data scientist roles in the United States return the unmarked postings alongside the marked ones, and the unmarked ones are where the range sits.
Then read the requirements rather than the title. A title is one line written by someone who wanted the posting to sound senior. The requirements are written by the person who has to fill the seat, and they are often softer than the title implies.
Method
Every posting is counted once. The index holds roughly 1.34 rows per distinct posting, because boards relist and because a single advertiser can run one title hundreds of times, so everything is collapsed on title, company and location first. Counting rows would be counting advertising budget.
The level comes from the title, not the body. We do not parse "5+ years experience" out of the requirements, which means every figure here understates how senior this market is rather than overstating it. Reading the bodies would make the picture worse, not better.
The honest gap: none of this says how many people apply per posting. That is the other half of why entry-level hiring feels impossible, and it is the half an index of adverts cannot see.
Related
- What 985 companies are actually hiring forA census of 148,071 open roles across 985 company career pages. Software engineers lead, and sales outnumbers every data and AI role combined.
- Where the salary is actually statedPay appears on a minority of job adverts, and which ones depends far more on the board that carried the advert than on the country the job is in.
- What employers actually name as skillsPython leads, English is second and Excel outranks SQL. What company career pages name when they list a skill, and what that leaves out.
Every figure here comes from the jobs Jobzyl has indexed, and carries the date it was pulled. Subscribe by RSS, or run the search yourself.