What Actually Got Recent Grads Hired: The 4 Things That Beat the Degree Itself

A big survey of hired graduates ranked what mattered most in landing a job. The diploma came in fourth.

TL;DR: In the Cengage 2025 Employability Report, graduates who landed jobs said the top four things that got them hired were personal referrals (25%), internships and prior work experience (22%), interview skills (20%), and the degree itself (17%) (Cengage Group). Meanwhile, recent college-grad unemployment hit 5.7% in Q4 2025 and underemployment hit 42.5% — the highest since 2020 (NY Fed). The degree is the foundation. What you build on it is what actually converts.

The 2026 entry-level squeeze

Start with the market you are entering. The New York Fed’s recent-college-grad tracker pegged Q4 2025 unemployment for workers aged 22–27 with a bachelor’s degree at 5.7% and underemployment at 42.5% — both the highest readings since 2020 (NY Fed). The Strada Education Foundation and Burning Glass Institute found 52% of recent four-year graduates are underemployed one year after graduation, and 45% are still underemployed a decade later (Strada “Talent Disrupted,” Feb 2024).

The Cengage 2025 survey, which polled 865 hiring managers, 971 recent graduates, and 698 instructors, added more numbers: only 30% of 2025 graduates found full-time employment in their field (down from 41% in 2024), 33% were unemployed and actively seeking work (up from 20%), and 76% of employers said they were hiring the same or fewer entry-level workers than last year (Cengage 2025).

That context matters because it sets the bar. In a tight market, the things that separate candidates sharpen. When Cengage asked graduates who did land jobs what got them there, their rank-ordered answer was clear. Here are the four in order, with what the data says about each and what to do about it.

Factor #1: Personal Referrals (25%)

Referred candidates do not just “get an advantage.” They get a fundamentally different funnel.

• SHRM reports that employee referrals deliver more than 30% of all hires and 45% of internal moves, and 88% of employers rank referrals as the best source for above-average candidates (SHRM).
• Jobvite’s 2024 Recruiter Nation Report put employee referrals and career websites tied at 35% of top hiring sources among 1,200+ talent-acquisition decision-makers (Jobvite).
• Analysis of ATS data from Ashby confirms referred candidates convert to hires at dramatically higher rates than applicants through other sources (Ashby Talent Trends).

How to do this as a student

You do not need to “know people” in the industry. You need to create paths to the 3–5 people you want an introduction from.

1. LinkedIn Alumni Tool. Go to your school’s LinkedIn page, click “Alumni,” and filter by employer or job title. You now have a searchable list of people who share your college and work where you want to work.
2. Three informational interview rule. Every month of junior and senior year, do three 20-minute informational calls. Not job-asks — curiosity-driven conversations. Average conversion-to-referral runs well above the cold-application rate in any source you can find.
3. Faculty referrals. Professors in your major often have alumni they placed. One good conversation in office hours outperforms fifty cold applications.
4. Weak ties outperform strong ties. Mark Granovetter’s classic sociology holds up in modern data: the people slightly outside your core circle know jobs yours does not. Go wide.

Factor #2: Internships and Work Experience (22%)

Internships are the single most durable predictor of post-graduation outcomes in the research literature. Two data points tell the story:

• NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co-op Report found that 62% of 2024 interns received full-time offers from their host employer, with in-person interns converting at 58.5% and hybrid at 46% (NACE, March 2025).
• Paid interns in the Class of 2024 had an average starting salary of $68,041 vs. $53,125 for unpaid interns — a ~28% premium. Paid interns received 1.61 job offers on average vs. 0.94 for unpaid (NACE Compensation Guide).
• Strada’s analysis found that participating in an internship lowers the probability of underemployment by about 49% one year after graduation (Strada).

And in the Cengage survey, 87% of recent grads credited internships with securing their job.

How to do this as a student

1. Apply for next summer by September. The highest-conversion programs — finance, consulting, tech — close applications by October. Everyone else, by February at the latest.
2. Prefer paid over unpaid. When forced to choose: a paid internship at a smaller company beats an unpaid one at a household name almost every time, by salary, offer count, and conversion.
3. Treat co-ops as superior to single summers. Multi-term co-ops place you in real project work long enough for the employer to bet on you. Conversion rates run higher than one-off summer internships in every NACE cohort since tracking began.
4. Micro-internships count. Platforms like Parker Dewey offer 10–40 hour paid engagements that signal initiative on a resume when a traditional internship is not feasible.
5. If you have zero internship experience heading into senior year: do not panic, but do not wait. Apply for spring semester project-based roles, research assistantships, or part-time paid work in your target industry now.

Our careers explorer includes salary and employment projections for 1,000+ occupations, which is useful for deciding which industries to target your internship search toward.

Factor #3: Interview Skills (20%)

The evidence on how fast hiring decisions get made is stark and repeatable. CareerBuilder’s research found that 51% of hiring managers know within the first five minutes whether a candidate is a good fit. The most common nonverbal mistakes: failing to make eye contact (67%), not smiling (38%), and poor posture (CareerBuilder).

Robert Half’s hiring managers ranked lack of company research as the #1 interview killer, ahead of communication issues and resume inconsistencies (Robert Half).

How to do this as a student

1. Mock interview through your campus career center. Three times. Career centers are free, they see your real interview weaknesses on camera, and three sessions is where most students’ delivery noticeably improves. Most students use the career center once, if at all.
2. Learn the STAR method cold. Situation, Task, Action, Result. Every behavioral question gets the same scaffold. Write five STAR stories ahead of time that cover leadership, conflict, failure, initiative, and teamwork. You will map 90% of real questions to them.
3. Research the company to the point of diminishing returns. Read the most recent quarterly letter (public companies), recent press releases, and the LinkedIn posts of the person interviewing you. You should be able to say, specifically, why this employer — not a generic flattery line.
4. Ask three questions you actually want answered. “What is the biggest unknown on the team right now?” beats “What’s the culture like?” by a mile.
5. Record yourself. Filler words, pacing, hand positioning. Ten minutes on video with your own script is worth more than an hour of reading interview-prep articles.

Factor #4: The Degree (17%)

The degree ranked fourth — not zero. It is the filter that makes employers read the resume in the first place. NACE’s 2025 Job Outlook found only 38% of employers use GPA as a filter, and nearly two-thirds of employers use some form of skills-based hiring for entry-level roles (NACE 2025 Job Outlook). Indeed Hiring Lab reports 52% of U.S. job postings in January 2024 mentioned no formal education requirement, up from 48% in 2019, and the share requiring a bachelor’s fell from 20.4% to 17.8% (Indeed Hiring Lab, February 2024).

But be careful reading that as “the degree doesn’t matter.” Research by Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found that despite loud corporate announcements about “skills-first hiring,” fewer than 1 in 700 hires in 2023 actually went to non-degreed workers as a result of announced degree drops (Skills-Based Hiring, 2024). The degree still functions as a screening tool at most large employers, even when the posting does not list it as required.

How to do this as a student

1. Maintain a 3.3+ GPA if possible. Most GPA filters that exist sit at 3.0 or 3.3. Dropping below either turns some doors into walls.
2. Your major matters less than you think, but what you did inside it matters more. A humanities major with a targeted portfolio and an internship beats a business major with neither in most entry-level screens.
3. If your program has a reputation gap for what you want to do: counteract it with specific evidence. A capstone project with real-world data, a published research paper, a competition placement.
4. Explore our majors directory to see what fields are associated with the occupations you are considering — the more you match your program to the career, the less the degree has to do the heavy lifting on its own.

Bonus factor (not in Cengage’s top 4, but employers are screaming for it): AI literacy

Microsoft and LinkedIn’s 2024 Work Trend Index, surveying 31,000 people across 31 countries, found that 66% of leaders say they would not hire someone without AI skills, and that 75% of knowledge workers are already using AI at work — but only 39% have received employer training (Microsoft/LinkedIn).

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 projects 92 million jobs displaced and 170 million created by 2030, a net gain of 78 million — but with 40% of existing job skills expected to change. AI and big data is the fastest-growing skill category; analytical thinking is named essential by seven of ten companies (WEF Future of Jobs 2025).

Three low-cost ways to build credible AI exposure before graduation:

• A free AI course (Google AI Essentials, Microsoft Copilot for Work, Coursera’s AI For Everyone). Adds a visible signal on LinkedIn.
• One portfolio project where you used AI to solve a real problem — a research paper you wrote with AI as a collaborator, an app you prototyped, an analysis you ran. Document the workflow.
• One professional context where you led with AI — an internship task, a club project, a class assignment. Being the person who figured out how to use the tools gets you remembered.

The 12-month plan by graduation year

Sophomore year

• Choose a major you can explain in terms of a target occupation family, even loosely.
• Take one class that builds a hard skill outside your major (stats, programming, accounting).
• Do one summer of paid work — any paid work, even outside your field.
• Start your LinkedIn.

Junior year (the critical year)

• Apply for summer internships between August and February. Aim for 15+ applications; convert 1–3 to offers.
• Do three informational interviews per month through the LinkedIn Alumni tool.
• Take the company-research habit seriously: read the quarterlies, know the named competitors.
• Mock-interview through the career center at least twice.

Senior year

• Summer-internship conversion: most full-time offers will come from the employer you interned with, so do your junior summer well.
• For those without a return offer: applications from October to December, heaviest networking from January to March.
• Keep GPA stable. Do not coast your final semester.
• Learn one AI tool deeply. It will differentiate you at offer time.

What to do with all this

The degree is still worth getting. The Cengage ranking is not about devaluing college — it is about calibrating how much of the hiring outcome the degree does by itself. The answer is: some of it, but less than most students assume. The other 83% is things you can actively work on during the three or four years you are in school.

If you are a counselor, the rank-ordering itself is useful in conversations with families. “Which of these four is your student actually doing?” is a more productive starting point than debates about major prestige.

Our majors directory and career explorer cover the tools students and counselors can use to match specific programs to specific labor-market outcomes. The best-colleges rankings identifies schools that score well on exactly the post-graduation metrics this article is built around.

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Sources

• Cengage Group — “2025 Employability Report” (September 2025) — cengagegroup.com
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York — The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (Q4 2025) — newyorkfed.org
• Strada Education Foundation & Burning Glass Institute — “Talent Disrupted” (February 2024) — strada.org
• NACE — 2025 Internship & Co-op Report Executive Summary (March 2025) — naceweb.org (PDF)
• NACE — 2024 Guide to Compensation for Interns and Co-Ops — uconnectlabs.com (PDF)
• NACE — 2025 Job Outlook (Revised January 2025) — naceweb.org (PDF)
• SHRM — “Employee Referrals Remain Top Source for Hires” — shrm.org
• Jobvite / Employ Inc. — 2024 Recruiter Nation Report (October 2024) — jobvite.com (PDF)
• Ashby — Talent Trends Report: Referred candidates — ashbyhq.com
• CareerBuilder — “1 in 2 Employers Know About a Candidate Within First 5 Minutes” — careerbuilder.com
• Robert Half — “5 Interview Mistakes You’ll Want to Avoid” — roberthalf.com
• Indeed Hiring Lab — “Educational Requirements Are Gradually Disappearing From Job Postings,” Cory Stahle (February 2024) — hiringlab.org
• Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School — “Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice” (2024) — burningglassinstitute.org
• Microsoft & LinkedIn — 2024 Work Trend Index: “AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part” (May 2024) — microsoft.com
• World Economic Forum — Future of Jobs Report 2025 (January 2025) — reports.weforum.org (PDF)

Editor’s note: U.S. market focus; public data and reporting current as of April 2026.