(TNND) — Drexel University’s 2026 College Hiring Outlook, which will be released in the coming days, found that small businesses are planning to hire fewer new college graduates.
Around a fifth of small businesses surveyed for the new report said they don’t plan to hire college grads or expect to hire fewer of them than they did a year earlier.
And smaller companies are about 30% more likely to say they don’t plan to hire recent grads than larger companies.
The Drexel researchers said this marks the sharpest pullback for small business hiring of grads in more than a decade.
The job market has gotten pretty tough for undergrads, said David Prisco, the director of the Center for Career Readiness at Drexel.
And fewer opportunities at small businesses aren’t helping those young workers navigate the low-hire, low-fire jobs market that’s made life harder for all job seekers.
“I definitely think it compounds the challenge,” Prisco said. “Entry-level roles historically are the first to be paused and the last to come back.”
He said businesses, especially smaller operations, focus more on experience during periods of uncertainty. When business is booming, they’re more likely to take a shot on young employees as a long-term investment.
Most of the pullback at small companies comes down to a lack of resources.
“A lot of employers, especially smaller employers, are expressing that hiring a recent graduate, it’s an investment. They might have a vacancy, but they don’t necessarily have a team, staffing, for formal training, different infrastructure to onboard someone, the management and supervision that’s needed for an individual that’s not used to the workforce,” Prisco said.
“So, even if an employer has a vacancy right now, a lot of them are saying, ‘Well, we want someone with experience.’ Or we also have employers that are saying, ‘Well, we would like to open up a new position, but because of some different economic uncertainty or tighter margins, we’re opting just to move forward without actually opening up that position,'” he added.
Prisco and fellow researcher Cuneyt Gozu, the academic director of Drexel’s Center for Career Readiness, said these challenges speak volumes for the importance of internships or cooperative education programs.
Those can give college students a foot in the door and practical experience under their belt. Both can be vital for convincing a small business to take a chance on a new grad.
“Being open-minded, being a true professional” is also key, Gozu said.
So-called soft skills that are transferable from job to job can make an early-career applicant stand out in a competitive field.
And Gozu said students should start sharpening those skills as early as possible. Don’t wait for graduation to get good at time management, teamwork, and taking initiative.
“These are all critical skills,” Gozu said.
And the researchers said employers want to see applicants who use artificial intelligence ethically.
Americans are worried AI will take away jobs, and Prisco expects AI to indirectly impact this year’s crop of college grads.
But he’s hopeful that over time, new opportunities will arise to overtake the shrinkage caused by AI.
“AI tools are allowing small businesses to automate and streamline different tasks that might have been held by a junior staff member in the past,” Prisco said. “That doesn’t mean that all talent is eliminated. We still need individuals to monitor those programming, but I think what we will see is a little bit of a shift in what the jobs are, and I think this is going to mirror a lot of what happened with the Internet boom in the late ‘90s, early 2000s.”
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