… And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by founders, CEOs, and scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzz, no bullshit.

50 years ago this week, Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album hit #1, and while I”m not a super fan by any means, still thought it was worth a quick shout out.

🎧 Want the whole vibe? Follow the public playlist on Spotify right here.

Here's a crazy but mostly true, thought: a 22-year-old with a fresh college degree is now more likely to be unemployed than the average worker.

Welp, that happened quickly!

The New York Fed put numbers on it this summer. Recent grads are sitting at 5.6% unemployment and 42% underemployment, which means nearly half of the ones who did find work landed in jobs that never needed the degree in the first place. Entry-level hiring has cratered since 2022, and in tech specifically, it's down something like half from where it was pre-pandemic.

Without exaggeration, I don't think this is a "blip" or a single moment in time; it looks more like a consistent trend, with the entry-level white-collar job collapsing as an entire category.

Now here's the more interesting part, because as much as it'd be easy to say "it's AI's fault!", the facts may not bear that out.

Even the economists can't agree on the cause of the trend, and the fight between them is most of the story here:

So, who knows?! It's the robots, it's Zoom, it's [fill in the blank with whatever you're most pissed off at these days].

I'm not actually here to guess or speculate, because while everybody's arguing about the cause, I think it's more worth thinking through the ramifications and what you can (or should) do about it.

Ask this simple question: If a whole generation of companies stop hiring and training juniors, where do the senior operators of 2035 come from?

Translation: you can't skip the apprenticeship and still end up with master craftsmen.

The senior person you'll be desperate to hire in five or seven years is an anxious kid right now looking to dive in, and if nobody gives them reps, they'll never turn into that person you need later on.

Let me step back from the data for a second and just tell you what I've actually seen.

When I look back on my career, at the Fool, at The Hustle, at HubSpot, at Hampton, the hires I'm most often proudest of were almost never the polished senior folks with the perfect resume.

They were the junior ones. Brendan. Austin. Jared. Jacob. Jess. Maya. Kids (and I say that with love) who walked in straight out of college or a year or two into their careers, hungry as hell, and just worked.

Junior hires are often the most enthusiastic people in the building, the most open to learning, and the most eager to get handed something hard and told to go figure it out. And their endurance is bananas. They've got the gas to outwork a problem that would make a jaded senior person sigh and schedule a meeting about it.

And to be clear, junior doesn't mean "22 and clueless." It just means early. Someone a year or two in, still grinding, still deciding who they want to become. These are people who genuinely want to climb, succeed, learn, and evolve. A lot of them are pre-mortgage, pre-kids, pre-the-thousand-obligations that (rightfully) yank a veteran's attention in fifteen directions, so they pour everything into the work and soak up every bit of it like a sponge.

You don't get that energy back once someone's been burned a few times. So when it shows up at your door, cheap and eager, in a market where everyone else is too spooked to hire it, that might not be a risk, but rather the whole opportunity.

So, while everyone panics and freezes or just onboards bots, the deepest, hungriest, most affordable pool of junior talent in a decade is sitting around unhired.

If you're a gifted leader, teacher, mentor; if you've got any capacity to train, that's a gift you should really think about using right now.

Two things I'd actually do:

The category might be collapsing, but my guess is the people aren't.

Somebody's going to scoop up this reasonably-priced talent and look smart in 2035.

Might as well be you!

Your dashboards tell you that deals closed, not who's buying or why, so a company can quietly lose product-market fit without anyone noticing. The fix is simple: pull your last 20 or so closed deals, line them up against the ones from a year ago, and check whether the buyer, the problem, and the trigger drifted. This one will catch that drift before your forecast does.

McKinsey's latest read on the U.S. consumer: loyalty is cracking and shoppers are switching to cheaper brands and private label, and "trust" now outranks price. Worth a skim if you sell anything to anyone. Here’s the piece.

A Cornell study of ~150k households found people on GLP-1s cut grocery spend ~5.3% within six months — 8%+ for higher earners, with savory snacks down ~10%. An entire drug class is re-pricing the food industry from the demand side, and most brands haven't caught up. Just worth giving it a read.

Ask yourself the last time you hired a junior person and truly leveled them up.

Hit reply and tell me who it was.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan