Employers say they want students to have experience using artificial intelligence tools, but most students in the Class of 2025 are not using such tools for the job hunt, according to a new survey.

The study, conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, included data from 1,400 recent graduates.

Students who do use AI tools for their job search most commonly apply them to writing cover letters (65 percent), preparing for interviews (64 percent) and tailoring their résumés to specific positions (62 percent). In an Oct. 14 webinar hosted by NACE, students explained the benefits of using AI when searching for career opportunities.

Among student job seekers who don’t employ AI, nearly 30 percent of respondents said they had ethical concerns about using the tools, and 25 percent said they lacked the expertise to apply them to their job search. An additional 16 percent worried about an employer’s reaction to AI-assisted applications, and 15 percent expressed concern about personal data collection.

“If you listen to the media hype, it’s that everybody’s using AI and all of these students who are graduating are flooding the market with applications because of AI, et cetera,” NACE CEO Shawn Van Derziel said during the webinar. “What we’re finding in our data is that’s just not the case.”

About one in five employers use AI in recruiting efforts, according to a separate NACE study.

Students say: Brandon Poplar, a senior at Delaware State University studying finance and prelaw, said during the webinar that he uses AI for internship searches.

“It has been pretty successful for me; I’ve been able to use it to tailor my résumé, which I think is almost the cliché thing to do now,” Poplar said. “Even to respond to emails from employers, it’s allowed me to go through as many applications as I can and find things that fit my niche.”

Through his AI-assisted searches, Poplar learned he’s interested in management consulting roles and then determined how to best align his cover letters to communicate that to an employer.

Morgan Miles, a senior at Spelman College majoring in economics, said she used a large language model to create a résumé that fits an insurance role, despite not having experience in the insurance industry. “I ended up actually getting a full-time offer,” Miles said.

She prefers to use an AI-powered chatbot rather than engage with career center staff because it’s convenient and provides her with a visual checklist of her next steps, she said, whether that’s prepping for interview questions or figuring out what skills she needs to add to application materials.

Panelists at the webinar didn’t think using ChatGPT was “cheating” the system but rather required human creativity and input. “It can be a tool to align with your values and what you’re marketing to the employers and still being yourself,” said Dandrea Oestricher, a recent graduate of the City College of New York.

Maria Wroblewska, a junior at the University of California, Irvine, where she works as a career center intern, said she was shocked by how few students said they use AI. “I use it pretty much every time I search for a job,” to investigate the company, past internship offerings and application deadlines, she said.

Other student trends: NACE leaders also shared results from the organization’s 2025 Student Survey, which included responses from 13,000 students across the U.S.

The job market continues to present challenges for students, with the average senior submitting 30 job applications before landing a role, according to the survey. In recent years that number has skyrocketed, said Josh Kahn, associate director of research and public policy at NACE. “It was about 16 or 17, if I remember correctly, two years ago. That is quite large growth in just two years,” he said during the webinar.

Students who met with an employer representative or attended a job fair were more likely to apply for additional jobs, but they were also more likely to report that the role they were hired in is related to their major program.

Students who used an AI search engine (approximately 15 percent of all respondents) were more likely to apply for jobs—averaging about 60 applications—and less likely to say the job they landed matched their major. “That was a little surprising,” Kahn said. “It does line up anecdotally with what we’re hearing about AI’s impact on the number of applications that employers are receiving.”

Two in five students said they’d heard the term “skills-based hiring” and understood what it meant, while one-third had never heard the term and one-quarter weren’t sure.

Student panelists at the webinar said they experienced skills-based hiring practices during their internship applications, when employers would instruct them to complete a work exercise to demonstrate technical skills.

NACE’s survey respondents completed 1.26 internships on average and received 0.78 job offers. A majority of internships took place in person (79 percent) or in a hybrid format (16 percent). Almost two-thirds of interns were paid (62 percent), which is the highest rate NACE has seen in the past seven years, Kahn said. Seven in 10 students said they did not receive a job offer from their internship employer.

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