“No Experience, No Job”: Why Indian Companies Don't Want Freshers Anymore

“We need someone with at least 2–3 years of experience.”
Indian graduates today send hundreds of CVs, clear multiple online tests, collect certifications and still keep hearing the same line...
So what changed? Is India really “not hiring freshers,” or is something deeper going on in the way our economy and job market work?
1. The paradox: Hiring intent is up, but freshers still feel shut out

Rejection because of No experience

On paper, India Inc does want freshers.

A TeamLease EdTech report showed that around 68–72 percent of employers planned to hire freshers in 2024, a clear rise over 2023.
A Naukri JobSpeak report found fresher hiring in India rose 11 percent in June 2025, driven by demand in accounting, insurance and AI/ML roles.
Overall unemployment for youth aged 15–29 is about 10.2 percent in 2023–24 according to the government’s PLFS survey: high, but not “no jobs at all.”

Yet social media is full of stories of graduates sending 500 CVs with zero callbacks, months of “open to work” LinkedIn posts, and constant rejection due to “lack of experience.”

The gap is not simply jobs vs no jobs. It is what kind of freshers companies want, and what kind of freshers the system is producing.

2. Earlier: A degree was your entry ticket If you talk to people who graduated in the late 1990s or early 2000s, their story sounds very different:

Campus placements often meant mass recruitment from engineering and MBA colleges.
A decent degree plus reasonable marks were enough to get shortlisted.
IT and BPO booms created large training batches where companies were ready to spend months teaching freshers from scratch.
Government and PSU jobs still absorbed a meaningful chunk of graduates.

The logic was simple:
“Degree = proof you’re disciplined and can learn. We’ll train you for the rest.”

That logic is breaking down.
3. Now: Degrees are everywhere, skills are the real currency

Graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy toss their caps during the academy's graduation and commissioning ceremony, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., May 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)

India produces millions of graduates every year. But a large share are simply not job-ready for what companies actually need today.

Mercer | Mettl’s India Graduate Skill Index 2025 puts overall employability at just 42.6 percent. Many non-technical roles like HR and digital marketing show even weaker job readiness.
A 2025 feature on Indian engineering talent notes that while roughly 72 percent of engineers are “employable” by test standards, only a small fraction actually land roles aligned with core disciplines, because curricula lag behind fast-growing areas like AI, analytics and IoT.
Another analysis points out that only about half of India’s graduates are considered job-ready, especially due to gaps in communication, teamwork and adaptability.

So the old formula
“BTech + MBA + English = job”
has quietly been replaced by

“Skills + portfolio + attitude + some experience = interview.”
This is why you now see:

Coding tests and take-home assignments even for entry-level roles
Emphasis on GitHub, projects, open-source contributions, internships
HR asking, “Show me what you built,” not just “What did you study?”

4. Why companies are obsessed with “experience” From the company’s side, insisting on “2–3 years of experience” is not just snobbery. It is economic risk management.
a) Training freshers is expensive and slow Hiring a fresher means:

3–6 months of lower productivity
Costly training programs
Mistake risk in client-facing or revenue-linked work
Uncertainty about whether the fresher will quit as soon as they get a higher offer

In a tight-margin environment, where companies are under pressure to stay lean, it feels “safer” to:

Hire someone who has already been trained by another company
Or rely on contract / gig workers
Or automate entry-level tasks altogether

b) AI and automation are eating entry-level work A lot of the work that used to be done by freshers is now partly automated:

McKinsey-style estimates suggest that a significant share of employees worldwide may need to change roles due to AI automation.
In India, white-collar sectors like IT, finance and customer support are directly in the firing line. One report noted that fintech firm PhonePe automated about 60 percent of its customer support roles over five years with AI-based tools.

If bots can handle FAQs, ticket triage and basic data work, companies feel less pressure to maintain a large bench of entry-level employees.

Result:
The “training ground” roles, which used to be perfect for freshers, are shrinking.
5. The experience trap: If everyone wants experienced people, how do freshers begin? This is the core economic problem no one wants to admit.
Freshers are stuck in a loop:

Companies say
“We cannot risk hiring you until you show experience.”

But to get that experience, freshers need someone to hire them first.

To break this loop, the system has quietly created new, more painful entry gates:

Long unpaid or underpaid internships
Six-month “probation” with low stipends before conversion to full-time
Freelance and gig work where freshers build portfolios without any formal employer
Referrals and networking power, where students with strong family / alumni connections convert opportunities more easily than equally capable peers

Economically, the risk of training and grooming talent is being pushed away from companies and onto:

Students and their families, who pay for extra courses, bootcamps and certifications
Colleges, which are scrambling to add “industry readiness” modules
Government skill programs and apprenticeships

6. The silent evolution: From “marks and references” to “portfolio and proof” Earlier, the hierarchy was something like:

Your college brand

Your percentage / CGPA

Your personal references (relatives, professors, family friends)

Today, the hierarchy is mutating into:

Skills demonstrated in real work – projects, code, designs, writing samples

Hands-on exposure – internships, live client work, hackathons

Soft skills – communication, problem solving, collaboration

Then your degree, marks and references

Why?
Because companies have discovered the hard way that:

A topper with weak communication can still fail in client-facing roles
A “big college” tag does not guarantee adaptability in fast-changing tech stacks
Business needs change faster than university syllabi

There is a growing policy push to bridge this gap. For example, IGNOU has tied up with the Ministry of Skill Development to set up skill centres across India, integrating industry-relevant vocational training with formal degrees under the National Skills Qualification Framework.

That is the direction the ecosystem is slowly moving toward:
Degree + Skills + Proof of Work, not degree alone.
7. The macro picture: India grows, but young workers feel left behind Official data paints a mixed picture:

The Economic Survey 2024–25 says overall unemployment (15+ years) has fallen from 6 percent in 2017–18 to around 3.2 percent in 2023–24, with rising EPFO enrolments pointing to more formal jobs.
But youth unemployment (15–29 years) still hovers around 10 percent, and remains a major concern in the India Employment Report 2024, which focuses heavily on youth employment challenges.

So the economy is adding jobs, but not always the kind of jobs, or in the locations, or at the pay levels that graduates expected when they signed up for a degree.

This mismatch explains why you see:

Engineering graduates preparing for government exams unrelated to their field
MBAs taking sales roles that pay less than they thought
Graduates working in gig deliveries while searching for “real” jobs
Skilled young people planning to move abroad where they believe their skills will be valued better

8. So what can change? (Beyond “learn skills” advice)

New Delhi, Dec 9 (IANS) Indian employers report an extremely strong job market in India in the first quarter of 2026, with organisations increasingly willing to invest in skills, technology, and talent, a report said on Tuesday.

Telling freshers “just learn skills” is lazy advice. The incentives have to shift at multiple levels.

a) What companies can do

Treat fresher hiring as an investment, not a cost – build structured 6–12 month apprenticeship tracks instead of expecting “client-ready” 21-year-olds.
Co-create curricula with colleges – help design final-year projects and practical modules aligned with real tools and tech stacks.
Reward managers for grooming talent – not just for quarterly numbers, but for how many juniors they successfully develop.

b) What colleges can do

Reduce filler theory and embed mandatory internships, live projects and labs from second year onwards.
Build career cells that focus on portfolios, not just mass CV forwarding.
Partner with local industries and startups for small, continuous problem-solving assignments, rather than one big final-year project that no one ever uses.

c) What students and freshers can realistically do While the system slowly changes, freshers still have to survive now

. Some practical moves:

Start building proof of work in college itself – GitHub repos, design portfolios, blogs, case studies, small business experiments.
Use freelancing platforms, local businesses and NGOs as your training ground if formal internships are scarce.
Focus heavily on communication and basic professionalism – many employers repeatedly say these are the biggest blockers, not raw intelligence.

9. The uncomfortable truth The economic problem no one likes to say out loud is this:
India wants the energy and creativity of its young people,
but it does not want to pay the full cost of training them.
So everyone quietly passes the bill:

Parents pay in the form of higher education fees and extra courses
Students pay with unpaid internships and delayed financial independence
Society pays when a frustrated, underused young workforce feels excluded from the “India growth story”

If every company keeps saying “come back after 2–3 years of experience,” then as a country we have to ask:

Who exactly is supposed to give those first 2–3 years to an entire generation?

Until we answer that honestly, freshers will keep feeling like outsiders in an economy that keeps boasting about growth.