Young people face new challenges in the job market as youth unemployment soars

Youth unemployment has reached its highest point in 15 years, and experts helping young Londoners find work say the main issues are their lack of experience paired with steep competition.

London's fast growing population might mean more opportunities long-term, but for now it amounts to fewer job openings than job-seekers, especially for entry-level positions, according to Tyler Paget, manager of employment services at Youth Opportunities Unlimited (YOU).

For young people, this means being overlooked by potential employers, he said.

"They don't have the work experience quite yet or the confidence and they're just not getting the same shot that they used to," said Paget.

The latest Canadian employment figures from July, 2025 show unemployment for people aged 15 to 24 has risen to 14.6 per cent, which is the highest it has reached since 2010—excluding the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this group, high school-aged kids are having the most difficulty finding jobs, with an unemployment rate of 31.4 per cent.

More youth than before may also be looking for work now. Paget has seen a steady increase in the number of young people accessing YOU's employment services over the past three years, he said.

"The cost of living has just gone up so much that, quite frankly, fewer and fewer young people can afford to just focus on school," he said. "They have to look for employment in order to pay rent and pay for food and those sorts of things."

Increasing automated hiring practices are only adding to the difficulty, he explained. Applicants rarely get an opportunity now to meet a hiring manager face-to-face, and more businesses are relying on algorithms or A.I. to filter through resumes. This harms the chances of young job-seekers, Paget said, as it only valus the experience on their resumes and not their actual potential.

Discouraged youth are turning to other services for help, as well. Employment agencies, like Express Employment Professionals, are finding more 18 to 25-year-olds coming to them for help, said James Norris, owner of the agency's London franchise. Oftentimes, young people are applying to so many jobs and hearing nothing back, leading to feelings of frustration, he said.

"Sometimes they're coming to us because they don't know where else to go," he explained. "We help individuals with determining what skills and experience they have and speak with the employers that we're working with to get them looking past that resume."

The perception that there aren't any jobs out there is false, Norris believes, explaining that it's more the challenge of matching the right people to the right jobs. On the applicant side, it's not being able to fully identify their skills and experience, he said, and for the employer, it's being inundated with too many unqualified applicants for a single position and lacking the staff and resources to properly screen them.

For young candidates applying to jobs, getting that resume perfected is always important, Paget said, but it's equally important to get out and meet people.

Finding a way to get that face-to-face interaction with a hiring manager, even if it's just a 30-second conversation, can mean a better chance of having your resume selected out of the pile of hundreds, he added. .

On the community side, a more strategic approach to youth unemployment is necessary, he said. Part of YOU's success, he explained, comes down to their employer partnerships and their youth-specific programming to help them build young job-seekers' skills and confidence. More programs like this for youth would help, he said.