Is it hard to get a job as a fresher in India? Why hiring is softer, and what an internship changes

How much of the hiring is going to freshers?

About one new hire in seven, on the last full cross-industry figure. The India Skills Report 2025 states that demand for freshers is lower than the previous year, with an average of 14% of all new hires expected to be freshers across industries. Candidates with one to five years of experience were expected to take 47%.

Those demand-side numbers come out of the Early Career Edition of the India Hiring Intent Survey 2025. Its respondent base was upwards of a thousand corporations, spread over 15 industries. In the India Skills Report 2025, positive hiring intent for the one to five year bracket ran at 55.2%, and the six to ten year bracket was expected to supply 26% of new hires.

Those three brackets account for 87% of expected new hires between them. The one that shrank against the previous year was the fresher bracket.

The report's own summary is that the trend reflects a focus on both developing talent and tapping into experienced professionals.

Which industries still take freshers?

The spread between sectors is wider than the average suggests. On the same survey, the automotive industry expected 21% of its new hires to be freshers while manufacturing expected 5%. BFSI and IT both sat at 20%, and pharmaceuticals and healthcare at 9%. The figures below are shares of expected new hires by experience bracket, as published for 2025, and cover five of the fifteen industries the survey names individually.

Industry	Freshers	1 to 5 years	6 to 10 years
Automotive	21%	52%	20%
BFSI	20%	50%	20%
IT	20%	50%	25%
Pharma and healthcare	9%	54%	21.5%
Manufacturing	5%	70%	10%

If you send everything to manufacturing firms and a classmate sends everything to automotive firms, the two of you are working markets that differ by more than four times at the entry point.

Has the newest edition changed the picture?

In one sector, sharply. The India Skills Report 2026 reports that the IT sector now leads fresher hiring at 35% of its new hires, against the 14% cross-industry average of the previous year. Manufacturing is again at 5%, which that edition describes as down from prior years. Organisations also project 40% of planned hires in FY 2026-27 to be new roles, up from 29%.

The India Skills Report 2026 carries the same Wheebox authorship, with AICTE, CII and AIU alongside it, and its demand side again rests on more than a thousand corporations. It splits planned hiring 60% replacements to 40% new roles, and puts apprentices and interns at 5% of the workforce on average, rising to 12% in automotive and 10% in pharmaceuticals and healthcare.

The one to five year bracket has not given up its place. Pharmaceuticals and healthcare leads it at 65% of new hires, FMCG at 40% and BFSI at 32%.

So the softness is uneven and it is moving. IT went from 20% of new hires being freshers in the 2025 edition to 35% in the 2026 one, while manufacturing is published at 5% in both.

What do the government's own figures show?

Youth unemployment easing slightly, from a high base. The Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report for 2025, released by the National Statistics Office on 27 March 2026, puts the unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 29 at 9.9%, down from 10.3% in 2024. Among urban youth it fell from 14.3% to 13.6%.

For everyone aged 15 and above, the PLFS press note records an unemployment rate of 3.1% for both men and women. Among educated persons, meaning secondary schooling and above, it reads 6.5% in 2025 against 7.0% in 2024.

The press note carries two more lines worth your attention. In the 15 to 29 age group, 25.0% were estimated to be not in employment, education or training. And 5.0% of that age group reported having received or receiving formal vocational or technical training.

The youth rate of 9.9% is roughly three times the all-age rate of 3.1%.

Why does experience keep taking the slot?

Because it is what employers screen on. Work experience sits at the top of the assessment methods employers told the World Economic Forum they expect to still be using in 2030, at 81%, with skills assessments at 48% and a degree requirement at 43% behind it (Future of Jobs Report 2025). That ranking is worked through in the guide to how employers rank experience against qualifications.

The screening picture in India looks similar in a different form. Unstop's campus hiring page carries two numbers from its own Talent Report 2026, a survey of over 500 HR leaders alongside more than 37,000 students: campuses are being worked by 87.8% of companies, and 84% of undergraduates have no placement yet.

Filtering has not loosened much either. HirePro, in its State of College Hiring in India 2026 and quoted on the same page, finds CGPA still influencing hiring decisions at 51% of organisations, with only 21% fully moved to skills-first.

Read alongside the hiring intent numbers, both sets of screening data point at the same filter, and it is the filter you have least of as a fresher.

Is the supply side moving as well?

Yes, and in the same direction. Mercer Mettl's India's Graduate Skill Index 2025 puts overall graduate employability at 42.6% for 2024, down from a recalculated 44.3% the year before. The fall sits almost entirely in non-technical roles, which dropped from 48.3% to 43.5%, while technical roles rose slightly from 41.3% to 42.0%.

The index is built on a wide assessment base: over a million students, 2,700 plus campuses, 31 states and union territories. Its own explanation for the non-technical drop is that such skills follow a less structured learning path and need longer to develop than technical ones.

So two things tightened at once. Employers moved hiring intent toward experienced candidates, and the graduate pool's measured scores slipped on the skills the index itself says take longest to build.

What does an internship change about your position?

It gives you something to say in the experience column. It does not move you into the one to five year bracket that was expected to supply 47% of new hires. What changes is that a specific piece of work exists, with dates, a target and an outcome you can describe.

The infrastructure for this is already in place at most employers. Unstop's campus hiring summary reports that 78% of organisations run internship programmes, while just 16% of all organisations it surveyed hire on more than four in five of their interns. The programme is easy to find; the conversion rate behind it is not high.

Three things it does move. It supplies an answer to the work-experience question. It produces a referee who has watched you work. And it gives you something concrete to put where the resume currently has coursework.

If you have already graduated, the gap question is handled separately in the guide to interning after you have finished your degree.

Where should you send applications this term?

To the sectors with the largest published fresher share. The 2025 table puts automotive at 21% and BFSI and IT at 20%, against manufacturing at 5%, and the 2026 edition lifts IT to 35%. The screening reports then tell you what the application has to contain.

1. Sort your target list by the fresher share in the table above, where your sector is one of the five it covers, rather than by brand recall. A 21% bracket and a 5% bracket are not the same market.
2. Start one piece of work now that will be finished before placement season, with a weekly output somebody else reads.
3. Write the experience line while the work is happening: dates, what you owned, what changed. Reconstructing it months later from memory rarely works.
4. Take at least one skills assessment and keep the score. A number you can quote is harder to discount than a description of the same work.
5. Apply off campus in parallel. 95% of Gen Z professionals in Unstop's report said they are open to off-campus opportunities if they find a better role elsewhere. Tools that help with the volume are covered in this guide to AI-assisted internship search.

If placements are already close, a shorter version of the same plan sits in six weeks with an empty internship line.

Does any of this depend on your college or your stream?

The hiring intent numbers do not say. Nothing published from the India Hiring Intent Survey in the two editions read here sorts fresher demand by college tier or by degree subject. It sorts by industry and by experience bracket, and those are the only two cuts published on the demand side.

The employability tests that do sort by tier and by stream are measuring test performance, which is a different quantity from demand. Both spreads have their own guides: what college tier does to employability, and the arts employability gap.

Market conditions, your stream and your college are all fixed for this term. What you can still change is whether a finished piece of work is on the page when you apply.