Marcus Habtom has been sending out job applications for almost a year.
“What makes me better than someone else, when all they have to look at is a piece of paper to compare one to another?” he told Capital Current.
The 20 year old isn’t the only young person struggling to find work. The unemployment rate for his age group is more than double that of the overall population.
While Ontario’s unemployment rate is 7.3 per cent, the unemployment rate for those aged 15-24 years sits at 15.5 per cent.
A Capital Current analysis of data Statistics Canada uses to track unemployment, shows the difference between the two rates have been consistent.
The 2020 spike in the above chart is attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many out of work, both young and old. More recent unemployment levels are still slightly higher than the pre-pandemic levels.
“Now, while the trends may be similar, the youth unemployment rate is about double the overall rate,” says Gordon Betcherman, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa.
Habtom is a second-year Algonquin College student. He left a retail job after the company was bought by a new owner who took a very different approach.
Primarily applying to jobs in the retail industry, he has relied mostly on Indeed, a global job matching and hiring platform, to find potential positions. But, in his search there haven’t been many opportunities for students.
Betcherman says that many young people may lack the skills and experience needed to fill some jobs. He also says that without a track record in the labour market, employers can be reluctant to hire.
“And when there’s a downturn, employers typically lay off the more recent hires, who are often young people,” says Betcherman.
He also noted that young men have higher unemployment rates than young women.
The Capital Current analysis found that the rate for men is two per cent higher than it is for women of the same age, as of February 2025.
But this doesn’t mean that young women aren’t struggling to find employment.
“From the beginning of January until February, I think I applied for over 35 jobs on Indeed,” says Sydney Trowell-Whitaker, a third-year student at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Of these applications, Trowell-Whitaker says she only heard back from four employers, all outside of the city.
From May 2021 to 2023, there was more than a 50 per cent increase in the number of working Canadians commuting over an hour to get to work, according to a StatsCan report.
This is likely because of an increase of workers returning back to the office after the pandemic. But for students and others without reliable transportation, their options for work can be limited to a smaller area.
For Marcus Habtom, the job search seems never-ending. Betcherman notes he likely isn’t the only one, with youth unemployment trends following similar patterns of the overall population.
“If the overall unemployment is high, the youth unemployment rate is high,” he says, making for a very saturated pool of job seekers.
“I feel like the biggest challenge when searching for a job is knowing that there are thousands of people in the same position as me,” says Habtom. “I’m going to try my best to find a job, but at the end of the day, there isn’t anything I can do to fix the economy.”
