Isabelle Burzese, an 18-year-old Concordia University student, is back home for the summer and looking for work, while her expenses pile up.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Isabelle Burzese started looking for a summer job in February. Now, after finishing her first year of studies at Concordia University in Montreal, she’s back home with her family and she’s still looking. With expenses piling up, her search is becoming more and more urgent.
“I’m not looking to get a job for spending money or money to have fun, even though I would love to,” the 18-year-old from Toronto says. “It’s really for tuition and rent and groceries and things like that for next year.”
Ms. Burzese estimates that she has applied for more than 40 jobs, and only one led to an interview, at Staples.
“I went in, put in my résumé and they offered me an interview on the spot. It went really well. But I still haven’t heard back from that. And it’s been a couple of weeks,” she says.
This is an especially difficult summer for young people looking for work, says Nathan Janzen, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada. High interest rates have meant that many employers may be trying to get by with fewer staff, and as a result competition among job seekers is that much more fierce.
“It’s been challenging, and more and more challenging for younger people than for the broader population,” Mr. Janzen says.
In April, Statistics Canada released data showing that the youth employment rate had dropped to 55 per cent, its lowest level since February, 2012, not including the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
In a sign of just how hard the job market has become, there were 46,060 young people receiving employment insurance benefits in February, the most recent month statistics are available, compared with 40,250 in May, 2023, representing an increase of 14.4 per cent.
Ms. Burzese says she will make what money she can from babysitting, tutoring and house-sitting. “But other than that, there is no solid backup plan,” she says. “I think I’m going to have to rely on loans and my parents being very, very angry at me for not being employed.”
Dildare Yurt, a student at the University of Waterloo, needs a job to pay her rent and tuition but has had no luck so far. She says the process of applying for jobs online is time-consuming and demoralizing.
“They’re asking you to take customer-service skills tests because the application requires that, but then they end up not even looking at your application,” she says.
The high cost of living means that Ms. Yurt is far from enjoying the sort of carefree summer that was once the norm for many people her age.
“If I want to go out with my friends, I have to think twice before doing that because prices are really, really going up and there aren’t even minimum-wage jobs that are accepting applications,” says the 18-year-old, who estimates she has so far applied for approximately 40 jobs.
“I’m kind of starting to lose hope, but I’m still applying because I don’t really have any other choice,” she says.
Adelaide Quinn hasn’t received any interviews or rejection notices after applying for almost 20 jobs so far.
She got her Smart Serve certification as soon as she got home from school at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., in April, and she began handing out her résumé at restaurants near her home in Toronto and applying for jobs on sites such as Indeed.
Many of the jobs she’s applying for, such as a barista at cafés, require two years of experience or qualifications she’d have to spend money to get, such as a food handler certificate or CPR, Ms. Quinn says.
“I’ll never get experience if I can’t just get a job,” the 19-year-old says. “But I feel like people aren’t willing to train.”
Most customer-service jobs now require previous experience ranging from seven months to a year, says Rosie Forth, co-ordinator at Drive Youth Employment Services in Vancouver.
“We’re seeing that it’s very tough for those without work experience because the job market is a little saturated with people who have more experience who are tending to take some of those more entry-level positions,” she says.
Those positions may also be scarce because many businesses are trying to scrape by with smaller teams to save costs, Ms. Forth says.
Harold Parsons, executive director of BGC (formerly Boys and Girls Club) South East in Ontario, has for years run employment programs for young people.
The tightening economy has meant that many students who might have once received help from their parents to pay their tuition or other education costs no longer have that support and are struggling to pay their day-to-day expenses, let alone save for school.
“They’re actually working to pay their bills right now,” he says. “They’re not even able to prefund themselves for expenses they’re going to see in the fall because things are so challenging now that they’re literally working to pay for their expenses that week.”