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Success ·Gen Z


GEN Z GRAD WITH 2 DEGREES BREAKS DOWN IN TEARS SHARING THE RESPONSES SHE
RECEIVED FROM MINIMUM WAGE EMPLOYERS AFTER HANDING OUT HER RÉSUMÉ IN NEW YORK

BYOrianna Rosa Royle
February 9, 2024 at 2:01 AM HST

“This is the most humbled I’ve ever felt in my life,” the teary-eyed Gen Z
graduate reported back to her TikTok fans after a disappointing day of
job-seeking.
@lohannysant — TikTok

“This is the most humbled I’ve ever felt in my life,” a teary-eyed Gen Z
graduate reported back to her TikTok fans while holding a stack of résumés after
a disappointing day of job-seeking—and the brutal wake-up call has struck a
generational nerve.



In the video, which has amassed over 23 million views, Lohanny Santos, a
26-year-old from Brooklyn with a dual degree and three languages up her sleeve,
shared that she’d been going door-to-door to find work to no avail. 



Santos, who posts under the handle @lohannysant, broke down in tears while
admitting that she’d given up hopes of becoming a full-time influencer and
needed a job with a full-time salary.

> 

After her online venture didn’t generate enough income to pay the bills, she
went into several coffee shops to hand them her resume—just like she did when
she was 16 and was looking for a job. But it wasn’t long before the Pace
University graduate realized that not even “two degrees in communications and
acting” is enough to land a $16-an-hour job in New York in the current tough job
market.



“It’s honestly a little bit embarrassing because I’m literally applying for,
like, minimum-wage jobs,” she cried. “And some of them are being like, ‘We’re
not hiring’ and it’s like, ‘What?’ This is not what I expected.”



“This sucks,” she concluded. 


GRADUATES HAVE IT BAD

Lockdown-era graduates already faced a tough road after they were forced to
study alone on Zoom during the pandemic rather than share the valuable
coming-of-age university experience enjoyed by their parents. Now they’re being
told that the degree they went into debt for is no longer worth much—as Santos
found out.

Many major employers have dropped their long-held degree requirements;
meanwhile, recruiters globally are now five times more likely to search for new
hires by skills over higher education. Even LinkedIn has echoed that the hottest
skills to land a job right now can’t be learned in a textbook.

“I was so upset and disappointed in myself because growing up, I was told that
if I get an education, if I go to college, then I’ll be successful,” Santos told
Business Insider—and she’s not the first Gen Zer to complain about feeling
tricked into pursuing further education.



Just last month, 27-year-old Robbie Scott similarly went viral on TikTok for
insisting that Gen Z isn’t any less willing to work than generations before.
Instead, he said, they are “getting angry and entitled and whiny” about the
prospect of having to work hard for the rest of their adult life, only to “get
nothing in return.”

“What’s sh-tty is, we’re holding up our end of the deal,” Scott said. “We’re
staying in school. We’re going to college. We’ve been working since we were 15,
16 years old…doing everything that y’all told us to do so that we can what?
Still be living in our parents’ homes in our late twenties?”


‘SO MANY PEOPLE ARE GOING THROUGH THIS RIGHT NOW’

Just hours after Santos hit upload on her harsh reality check moment, over 3
million people had tuned in and thousands of comments were flooding in from
people in a similar position.

“I had 50,000 followers on TikTok, and I woke up to an audience of 130,000
followers 48 hours later,” she told Business Insider. In the days since then,
her follower count has scaled to over the 150,000 mark.

“I’m so happy that I shared this with you because I feel like I can make someone
else feel less alone,” the TikToker added in a recent follow-up video. 



“Girl, I totally understand,” one user sympathized. “I’m an immigrant,
completely bilingual, and with a master’s degree, the only job that called me
back is at a bubble tea store and that’s what I’m doing now.”

“So many people are going through this right now! You are not alone! Nobody
seems to know what the future looks like right now, we’re all scared,” another
added.

Meanwhile, others accused Santos of “just trying to get attention as an
influencer so she doesn’t have to get a real job.”

Either way, Santos’s public job search somewhat paid off—yesterday, she
announced that she landed her first brand partnership with a contraception pill
company off the back of the video.

Have you had trouble gaining employment after graduating and had to resort to
unusual measures? We’d like to hear your story. Email: orianna.royle@fortune.com

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