The silence is the worst part
The Milburn Review puts into official language something most young job hunters already know. The system isn't working for them. But there are things they can do.
Alan Milburn’s interim review into young people and work is out today. It makes difficult reading.
Young people are trying. That’s what comes through clearly. They’re applying — sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of times. What they’re running into is what Milburn calls “applications disappearing into a void, interviews followed by silence, and recruitment processes that felt designed to deter rather than select.”
The most consistent complaint isn’t rejection. It’s hearing nothing at all.
That distinction matters. Rejection is hard but it’s navigable — you can learn from it, adjust, try again differently. Silence gives you nothing to work with. You apply the same way, get the same nothing back, and gradually start to wonder whether the problem is you rather than the process. Confidence erodes. And once confidence starts to go, it shows — which makes the next application less convincing, which generates more silence. It’s a spiral the system creates and then abandons young people inside.
There are real structural forces at play here. The nature of work is changing fast. Economic pressures are real. The formalisation of hiring has spread well beyond professional roles — a young person going for a warehouse job now faces the same automated screening, online portals and recorded video interviews as a graduate applicant. The first rung of the career ladder, as Milburn puts it, has thinned.
None of that is going away quickly.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. In a market this competitive, with processes this impersonal, the candidates who do get through tend to be the ones who know what they’re genuinely good at and can back it up with something more than a vague claim. Not “I’m a good communicator.” Not “I work well under pressure.” Actual examples. Specific moments. Evidence that somebody else noticed and remembered.
Most young people — most people of any age — struggle to articulate that. Not because they don’t have it. Because the things you’re genuinely strong at feel so ordinary to you that you stop counting them. You walk into an application underselling the very qualities that would get you hired.
The answer isn’t to work harder on the application. It’s to work differently on understanding what you bring. And that requires more than just thinking about when you’ve been at your best. It requires selecting the moments that are genuinely relevant to the opportunity in front of you — and understanding why they’re relevant. The same strength can tell very different stories depending on what the employer actually needs. A planning instinct that saved a logistics crisis might matter much more to one employer than another. Knowing which story to tell, and why, is what separates a convincing application from a generic one.
Most people never get that far. They either don’t know their strongest moments well enough to choose between them, or they pick the ones they’re most comfortable telling rather than the ones that actually fit. Taking the time to think carefully about that selection — ideally with the input of people who’ve seen you in action — is probably the most useful thing a job hunter can do right now.
In a market this difficult, most candidates are hoping the right employer will look past a standard application and see their potential. The ones who get through are the ones who made it impossible to miss.
The Milburn Review promises solutions later in the year. I hope they’re serious ones. In the meantime, if you’re a young person navigating this market — or know someone who is — think strengths. Think evidence. Think about who has seen you at your best and what they’d say.