Student Job Search took in 434,000 job applications for just 53,000 advertised positions in its most recent financial year, more than eight applicants for every role and the heaviest demand the organisation has recorded in more than 40 years of keeping data.
The figures were reported by RNZ on Monday morning, and they describe a student labour market that has not simply softened but changed shape. Student Job Search chief executive Louise Saviker said the pressure was without precedent in the organisation’s history. “Application rates are definitely the highest we’ve ever seen in Student Job Search’s data records over 40 years,” she said. The squeeze, she said, was “being driven by quite a significant convergence of issues that we don’t think has been seen in the history of student working over the last, say, 50 years.”
The number that matters most is not the volume of applications, though. It is what students are applying for. Casual and one-off work is now the dominant form of student employment, and that shift has been building for at least two years. In the second quarter of the 2025/26 financial year, 49 percent of all jobs listed with Student Job Search were casual roles and only 2.5 percent were permanent full-time, a share the organisation described in a January release as well below historic norms.
Vacancies in that quarter were actually up 9.8 percent on the year before. Applications topped 122,000, a rise of 10.5 percent. So the jobs are still being posted. There are simply more students chasing each one, and each one buys less certainty than it used to.
The pattern carried into 2026. When Student Job Search launched a job seeking app in April, it said students had lodged more than 117,000 applications in the first quarter of the year for fewer than 14,000 roles. “Demand continues to significantly exceed supply,” Saviker said at the time. “When students cannot access sufficient work, the impacts extend beyond income to wellbeing.”
Most of the vacancies sit in a narrow band of industries. Hospitality and tourism, education and childcare, household support, and agriculture account for the largest volumes, and those are all sectors where short shifts, seasonal peaks and casual contracts are ordinary practice. That helps explain why the reliable permanent part-time job that once anchored a student’s week has become scarce. Students are stitching together several small jobs instead. Saviker put it plainly in January, saying students are “having to work harder than ever to secure three or four roles, unlike in the past when they might have just had one permanent part-time role.”
The student picture sits inside a wider problem with young workers. Stats NZ figures show 17.3 percent of 15 to 24 year olds were unemployed in the year to March 2026, up from 16 percent a year earlier and the highest rate in more than 30 years. The share of young people not in employment, education or training was 14.4 percent in the March 2026 quarter, up from 13.3 percent in the December quarter. Youth unemployment has been the sharp end of the labour market slowdown for two years now, and the students turning up on Student Job Search are competing with everyone else in that age band.
For the people involved it is a demoralising process. George Davidson-Sims, who finished a degree in screen production and radio, told RNZ that repeated applications went nowhere. “It’s always a bit hard because you apply for so much stuff and nothing ever pops up and it’s just, there isn’t anything, at least for screen production,” he said, adding that “a lot of it is [having] to know the right people to get jobs.”
Gabriel Murphy, who has a Bachelor of Arts, said the silence was the hardest part. “It is quite tough to get almost complete radio silence from every avenue I look down,” he said. Communications and business graduate Alicia Lemmer framed it as a broken bargain. “Students put this investment into coming to university for a better future and for better job outcomes and that kind of opportunity feels like it’s been taken away,” she said.
The shortfall in hours is showing up in student welfare services. Auckland University of Technology Student Association president James Portegys told RNZ around 700 students had sought food assistance in the past three months, and described the speed at which supplies were disappearing. “I took a photo of the food shelf last Friday and I stood there for about 10 seconds [thinking] this was full just a couple of days,” he said.
There is a business consequence in all this that runs past the immediate hardship. Casual and one-off hiring is a rational response for firms carrying weak confidence and uncertain order books, because it converts a fixed wage cost into a variable one. But entry-level work has always doubled as the country’s informal training system. It is where a first reference, a first payroll record and a first set of workplace habits get built. When that layer thins out, employers lose the pipeline they will need when demand does return, and graduates arrive in the professional market with thinner CVs than the generation before them.
Saviker has made that point to employers directly. “We continue to encourage employers that we all started somewhere, and today’s student need those same opportunities,” she said in January.
Student Job Search is a charitable trust that has been placing tertiary students into work for more than four decades and is funded largely through the tertiary sector. Its data is not a full census of student employment, since plenty of students find work through Seek, Trade Me, word of mouth or family businesses. But it is one of the longest continuous records of what entry-level hiring looks like in New Zealand, and the trend it is showing has not been seen before in that record.
Have you or someone in your family struggled to find student or graduate work this year? Tell us what the search has been like in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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