The experience gap: why early talent needs evidence of work, not just a résumé

Ask a hiring manager what separates two equally qualified candidates and you will usually hear some version of the same answer: "Which one has actually done the work?" For young people, that question creates a loop. You need experience to get the job, and you need the job to get experience. This article looks at what recent research says about that gap, and what kind of evidence actually helps someone get through it.

Does the first job shape a graduate's career?

Researchers use the word underemployment for graduates working in jobs that don't typically require a college degree. It is not the same as unemployment, and it is not the same as working outside your major. It is a signal that a degree hasn't yet turned into work that uses it.

The Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute followed the careers of bachelor's graduates and found that 52 percent were underemployed a year after graduation, and that 45 percent were still underemployed a decade later ^[1]. The most striking finding concerns the starting point: 73 percent of graduates who started out underemployed remained so ten years after completing college ^[1]. That is an association, not proof that a first job causes a decade-long outcome, but it suggests early footholds matter.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks a related measure every quarter. In its 2026:Q3 update it reported that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates fell to 5.2 percent, "though the underemployment rate ticked up to 42.5 percent" ^[2]. The two studies measure slightly different groups, so their numbers aren't interchangeable, but they point the same way.

Graduates feel it too. In Cengage Group's 2025 survey, 30 percent of 2025 graduates reported securing full-time jobs related to their degree, compared with 41 percent of 2024 graduates ^[7]. And the gap isn't only about college graduates: RAND estimates that about one in seven young people aged 18–24 are disconnected, not engaged in school, training or work ^[9].

What do employers weigh when hiring graduates?

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) asks employers each year how they choose between candidates. In its most recent survey, employers said that having an internship with their organization or within their industry were the most influential factors when choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, the only two attributes rated as having "very much influence" ^[4].

Note the precision: it is relevant experience that carries weight, not any job on a résumé. Employers also doubt that education alone gets people there. In a 2026 Lumina Foundation–Gallup survey, only 54 percent of U.S. employers said colleges and universities were graduating students with the skills their businesses need ^[8].

Has skills-based hiring changed who gets hired?

If degrees are an imperfect signal, skills-based hiring is meant to be the fix: judge people on what they can do, not on the credentials they hold. Employers say they are adopting it. Among NACE survey participants, 70 percent reported using skills-based hiring, up from 65 percent the year before ^[3].

Practice has been slower than pronouncements. Researchers at the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School examined companies that removed degree requirements and concluded that "the increased opportunity promised by Skills Based Hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year" ^[5]. In the roles where requirements were dropped, hiring of candidates without degrees rose by just 3.5 percentage points ^[6].

The lesson isn't that skills-based hiring is failing. It is that removing a requirement doesn't, on its own, give a hiring manager a reason to say yes. Something has to replace the degree as evidence, and for most young people, that something doesn't exist yet.

What counts as credible evidence of skill?

If relevant experience is what tips decisions, then the useful question is: what does good evidence of that experience look like? It is more specific than a line on a résumé. In our view, it has four parts:

1. 01Work samples, real outputs the person produced, shared with the organization's permission (or redacted where confidentiality requires it).
2. 02A record of the contribution, what the project was, what the person was responsible for, how many hours they put in and what was accepted.
3. 03Feedback over time, evidence that someone reviewed the work, asked for changes and saw them made.
4. 04A reference from someone who watched the work happen, ideally the person who owns the work, not a program coordinator.

None of these is a guaranteed ticket to a job, and no one should promise that. But together they let a young person answer the hiring manager's question, "have you actually done this?", with something more than optimism.

What can companies do about the experience gap?

Most companies already have the raw material: ongoing projects with more useful work than the team has hours for, and experienced people who own that work. What's usually missing is a structure that lets a young person contribute safely, get paid for it, and leave with documentation.

That is the gap Altᵗ is designed for. Apprentices join a project a company is already running, guided by the employee who owns the work as their Mentor. They are paid for every hour, their hours and work are reviewed as they go, and they leave with a Mentor's letter, a project record signed by both of them, and work samples. We're early, our first pilots are being set up now, so we won't claim outcomes we haven't measured yet. But the design follows the evidence above: relevant, supervised, documented work.