[baked_ziti]

I have seen nearly zero job postings for positions that could be filled by new college grads.

There are numerous postings seeking interns. There are quite a few require 1-3 years experience. There are many seeking qualified professionals. I have seen almost nothing that would permit a new college grad to gain a position.

This leaves me wondering several things. One, how did business manage to offload the cost of absorbing the educated but inexperienced into the profession back onto the people. You can listen to people in hiring or executive positions bemoan the costs of training new software engineers, but how did we get to a point where literally everyone other than business is expected to bear every cost of doing business.

And two, how do new college graduates find work without either creatively interpreting the meaning of "experience" (that is, lying), or just ignoring the requirements portion of the job postings to which they reply.

[AdrianB1]

We hired about 5 new people in the past 2 years, some were still in college. The roles are junior developers or application managers. 2 were interns. At the same time, I cannot fill in 2 positions of qualified DBA's for almost one year. That makes the posting for experienced DBA's to stay longer on sites, giving the impression that we hire a lot of experienced people and no freshmen. Not true at all.

[esoterica]

Every big software company hires thousands of new grads every year. The caveat is that they recruit almost entirely from the pool of current college seniors, not people who have already graduated. Most competent grads have a job lined up well before they graduate so hunting for your first job AFTER you graduate is a giant red flag and most companies are going to be very skeptical about you. You aren’t seeing those postings on public job boards because they do most of their recruiting on campus.

The company I work for classifies all candidates as “campus” or “experienced hire”. There’s no category for non-experienced hires who are out of college, the company won’t even acknowledge that these people even exist because there’s no interest in recruiting from that pool.

[baked_ziti]

I actually don't believe this. The idea that the army of webdevs that find employment for the first time were recruited out of school strikes me as silly. In addition, your response directly contradicts the other responses, so someone is definitely exactly wrong. This answer sounds less plausible than the others.

[Mkulfan]

I don't think is really true, literally go to Google jobs/LinkedIn and type in new grad software engineer. There are thousands of open positions, all exclusively for new college graduates.

[baked_ziti]

I don't know about google search results, which I wouldn't trust for something like this. But I just logged back into indeed, searched 'new graduate software engineer' and the vast majority, as in nearly every ad, was a thinly veiled recruiter ad, or an internship, or was an irrelevant result; 7+ years experience required in the first 3 results and many more in successive results. This has been my experience on similar job boards.