The job market for new college graduates is the worst in the modern record, by the measure we feel matters most. 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.
So, where are the entry-level jobs?
By entry level we mean professional roles classified at the first rung, asking for a year of experience or less, i.e. not including jobs like frontline store and warehouse work. There are 16.3K of them open right now. Measured that way, the usual advice doesn't apply. The old-economy giants are twice as open to beginners as the more popular tech companies, and that's excluding their frontline hiring, which adds tens of thousands of roles on top. 72 of the Fortune 100 are hiring at this level right now. So are 420 tech companies. The difference is what share of their hiring is open to beginners.
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 roles
The way into these companies is overwhelmingly through revenue and process work rather than product work. Three quarters of the entry-level market involves talking to customers or keeping the machine running. Building the product is the sliver at the end, which is worth thinking about before spending another month applying only to engineering postings.
How the professional entry-level openings split by category. McCoy hiring tracker, August 2026.
Sales
Most entry-level sales roles manage existing accounts rather than hunt new ones, work that rewards follow-through more than cold-call nerve. Sales development, the classic first rung, is the smallest of the three main paths. Postings point to Salesforce, Outreach, and ZoomInfo as tools they use, and where they state pay, the median range is $51K to $71K.
Customer success
This category divides into a reactive half and a proactive one. Technical support answers when something breaks. Customer success managers work to keep clients from leaving in the first place. The tool that recurs is Salesforce, with SQL appearing often enough to reward learning it, and the median posted range is $47K to $73K.
Operations
Operations is the broadest and least standardized category, and the hardest to search for, because the titles rarely contain the words entry level. The postings typically mention Excel, SQL, SAP, and Tableau, and the median posted range is $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
What entry-level engineering exists is concentrated in backend and testing. The paths most self-taught developers focus on are often the most closed. Frontend engineering has only 20 openings in the entire category, and across every company we track there are only three entry-level iOS or Android roles. The postings name Python, Java, C++, and Linux as the programming languages of choice, and the premium is real -- a median posted range of $80K to $125K, roughly half again the other categories.
Across all four categories, about 5% of the roles are offered remote, and engineering is the most office-bound at about 2%. The New York Fed's researchers argue that remote work explains most of the rise in graduate unemployment, because employers hesitate to train people they never see. Whatever the cause, the job boards agree with the conclusion. The typical entry-level job is an in-person job, mostly 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.