The job market for new college graduates is the worst in the modern record. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts unemployment for recent graduates at 5.6% in early 2026, against 4.3% for all workers. For as long as the Fed's data goes back, having a degree meant better odds than the average worker. That's now inverted, and 41.5% of recent graduates who do have jobs are working in roles that don't require their degree.
Forbes reported this week on data from the hiring platform Cadient, which followed a stable panel of employers in healthcare, government, utilities, and transit. The share of salaried roles open to candidates with no experience has fallen 73% in four years, to one opening in 50, down from one in 15 in 2022. At the same time, roles requiring senior experience have doubled, the same tilt towards senior roles our numbers below show. Cadient's CEO called it "a structural problem, not a talent problem": employers "increasingly expect candidates to arrive with experience before they're given the opportunity to gain it."
None of that tells a graduate where they should apply. So we pulled the answer from the McCoy hiring tracker, which follows the public job boards of the Fortune 100 as well as about 1,000 technology companies, the employers recent graduates are most often excited by. The numbers below cover the roughly 294K open postings our system has classified, and every count can be checked posting by posting.
Who is hiring the most
The single biggest entry-level employer in our tracker is not a tech company, it is a bank. The pattern holds down the list. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, UnitedHealth, Citigroup, and AT&T out-hire nearly every tech name at this level, with Amazon the one tech giant near the top. The companies that take the most beginners -- banks, insurers, and telecoms -- hire them in cohorts. The logos on most graduates' lists, SpaceX and Goldman Sachs among them, hire them by the dozen.
The most common available entry-level roles
How the professional entry-level openings split by category. McCoy hiring tracker, August 2026.
Sales
Most entry-level sales jobs are account management, keeping the customers a company already has rather than winning new ones. The postings ask for Salesforce, Outreach, and ZoomInfo, and pay usually runs $51K to $71K.
Customer success
Technical support answers when something breaks. Customer success managers work to keep clients from leaving in the first place. The postings ask for Salesforce, and SQL comes up often enough to be worth learning. Pay usually runs $47K to $73K.
Operations
Operations is the biggest and most scattered category, and the hardest to search for, because the titles rarely include the words "entry level." The postings ask for Excel, SQL, SAP, and Tableau. Pay usually runs $56K to $70K.
General operations is the catch-all for the coordination work that keeps a specific business running. In the postings it looks like patient care coordinators at health insurers, transportation representatives at Amazon, fund servicing analysts at banks, scheduling specialists, and content quality reviewers. The title changes with the company. The work is keeping a process moving.
Engineering
Most entry-level engineering is backend and testing. Frontend and mobile, where a lot of self-taught developers start, barely exist at this level. Frontend has only 20 openings in the whole category, and there are only three entry-level iOS or Android roles across every company we track. The postings ask for Python, Java, C++, and Linux, and pay usually runs $80K to $125K, about half again what the other categories pay.
Almost none of these jobs are remote, about 5%, and for engineering it is closer to 2%. Most are in California, New York, and Texas, with a meaningful share in India and the United Kingdom rather than the US.
The McCoy hiring tracker follows who is hiring, at what level, across the Fortune 100, the AI labs, big tech, and the companies in between, one public posting at a time.