Like a chain coffee shop calling its smallest cup a “regular’” the Department for Work and Pensions offers no job centre, only Jobcentre Plus. The Norwich one is in Kiln House, a six-storey eyesore built in the 1970s that dominates the corner of Dove Street and Pottergate, which is otherwise a picturesque cobbled lane. After finishing a PhD in English in January 2025, I got to know those cobbles well. Every Thursday for three months I showed up at Kiln House to take my seat on the wipe-clean sofa and await my turn.
Between January and March 2025, I sent 168 applications for jobs at universities, magazines, publishers, estate agents, cafés, charities, insurers, shops and pubs. I interviewed for six companies (an online streaming service, a tutoring agency, a Toyota dealership, a men’s mental health charity, an off-shore wind company, a call centre), and I received one offer (the call centre). I applied for these jobs through LinkedIn, Reed, Indeed, Google and Instagram, and at one point I even instructed a tousle-haired recruiter (but his luck was as bad as mine).
My Gen X parents were supportive but just didn’t get it. Surely I was doing something wrong. Had I not tried walking into a local pub and handing in my CV at the bar? At the end of his career, my father had worked as a paint mixer at B&Q, a job he praised as much for the camaraderie and personal fulfilment as for the sizeable discount on patio furniture. Towards the end of my PhD, I took my dad’s advice and sent off an application online. A few weeks later, I heard back: rejected without interview.
Much has been written about the “grad-job apocalypse”. Graduate posts are at a record low. Unemployment among 16-25-year olds is at its highest for more than a decade. More than 700,000 graduates are claiming benefits. As Anoosh Chakelian wrote in April, almost a million young people are now Neets – not in education, employment or training. On 28 May, Alan Milburn’s landmark interim report found that the number of Neets could increase 16 per cent to 1.25 million over the next five years. But the disorientating scale of the problem obscures the torment each of these young people suffers. This is a mental and emotional condition as much as an economic one. A million Neets is a statistic; one Neet is a tragedy.
Since the coalition government raised tuition fees in 2012, universities have promoted courses in terms of the “transferrable skills” developed. Newcastle University lists “time management”, “networking”, “presentations”, “critical thinking” and “teamwork”; Birmingham City lists “technical understanding”, “problem solving”, “project management”, “creativity” and, again, “teamworking”. Recruiters love these bland criteria and websites such as LinkedIn encourage you to list them on your profile. But teamwork is hardly a skill: it is not learnable (or provable) like carpentry, or filigree, or scoring from the half-way line. Anybody can claim to manage their time or to work well alongside others. When a hiring manager is faced with a hundred applications that each list “problem solving” and “creativity” as though they are unique attributes, their decision is basically arbitrary.
I took a book with me to my first appointment at the Jobcentre Plus, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. I’d chosen it with a churlish half-irony: after graduating from Oxford with a degree in English, Dyer lived on unemployment benefit throughout the first half of the 1980s. In a 2015 piece for the Guardian, he wrote fondly of his time as one of the “dole wallahs”, that “varied coalition of the willingly unemployed”. Mostly this involved afternoon sex then chilling on a rooftop with a homemade bong. Dyer paints an alluring vignette of his “idyllic” time as one of the “state-funded leisure class”, not least because it gave him the opportunity to develop as a writer. The gift of the dole was leisure, and the gift of leisure was a career.
But 40 years later, I was no dole wallah. I was a Neet. My months on Universal Credit (UC) were nothing like Dyer’s “breadline affluence and indigent indulgence”. When I was claiming UC, the standard allowance was £393.45 a month. And being, like most university graduates, an unmarried person under 35, I qualified only for the “shared accommodation rate” of £393.50, yielding a princely £786.95 in total. The rent on my one-bed flat was £775.00. I tried to top this up with a bit of freelance work, writing and editing, but for every pound you earn while on Universal Credit, 55p is deducted from your allowance. The only way I could afford my rent and bills was to borrow money from my girlfriend and my family. Each bank transfer from a loved one arrived with a pang of shame and a perverse sense of luck. I knew that not everybody would have recourse to such funds, and that made me feel even worse.
To distract myself from the shame I went all-in on sending applications. Within a week I was putting in at least six or seven hours a day writing bespoke cover letters and tinkering with my CV. I’d wake early, telling myself this was to get a headstart on my fellow applicants (“Leave ’em in the dust,” I’d mutter to myself). In truth, the early mornings were a remedy to the sleepless nights: you struggle to keep your head on the pillow when you know you have nowhere to be the next day. After a quick sweep of the various job sites, I’d shortlist a handful of vacancies and get to work. My aim was always three applications in the morning and two in the afternoon. Some recruiters allow you to apply instantly (all you need is a pre-saved CV and a finger or thumb to click). Other applications took numerous hours; some entire days.
Yet on more than one occasion, the rejection email came within minutes. A 2025 report by LinkedIn suggested that recruiters across the globe are increasingly using AI to screen applications, with 37 per cent of organisations that year ‘“actively integrating” or “experimenting” with Gen AI tools. These automated screeners score applicants based on desirable keywords like “communication” or “collaboration”. (You can tell a broader story in the interview, of course, but then you only get an interview if you pass the initial screening.) As early as March 2024, the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology emphasised the risk of these automated screening tools. The published guidance argued that because AI screeners are trained on historical recruitment data, their results are warped by the biases of the past. This “disproportionately affects parents, people with care-giving responsibilities, people with disabilities or long-term health conditions and neurodivergent candidates”. For about 20 minutes I thought seriously about using AI to write my cover letters, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to the farce of a human using a robot to screen a robot used by a human.
Eventually my time as a Neet was done. The call from the hiring manager for the call centre resolved my anxiety on the spot. The storm that had blown in my ears for three months had calmed to a gentle breeze. The year since has been comparatively relaxed. I’ve spent much less time hunched over a laptop. Indeed I’ve worked far less overall since starting my 9-5. When you are looking for a job you cannot leave your work at the door: you take that edge-of-the-seat feeling into every room, every conversation. It is the ultimate form of unalienated activity: it is your life. But now I can close my laptop lid, raise my head from the desk and enjoy a life beyond the screen. The gift of each day’s eight hours of gainful employment is the five hours of gainful leisure I get every evening. But in one way at least things are the same: I’m still accruing interest on my student loans, just as I was when I was unemployed. In those months on Universal Credit, the interest rate charged by the Student Loans Company was 4.3 per cent; I accrued £628.92 of further debt. That might seem like a lot, but then the balance owed is £79,098.58. I could’ve spent eight and a half years on the dole with that.
To be a Neet is to feel a singular shame and self-loathing, a sense of being apart from everybody else. Between my morning and afternoon “sessions” of online form-filling, I’d take a two-hour walk. Initially I took these walks to check if any pubs or shops were hiring, but soon I came to enjoy the habit, making note of how the winter sun gave way to the bloom of spring. One of my routes would take me through the centre of Norwich past the old Debenhams, an art deco classic that has stood derelict since the store closed in 2021. In February 2026, Norwich city councillors approved plans to develop the site into 377 student rooms, to be operated by a private company. Millions of pounds will be spent on these plans, and millions should be yielded in return. In Norwich and elsewhere, vast sums of money pass through the hands of private companies when schoolkids become students. So why, then, do we do so little for those students when they become graduates?
[Further reading: Young, down and out of work]
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