Let’s not sugarcoat it. If you’re a student graduating in 2026,2027 or 2028, or a fresher who’s been job hunting for a few months and hearing nothing back you’re not imagining it. The market is harder. The numbers are real and they’re not small.
Fresher hiring in India’s IT sector peaked at 6 lakh jobs in FY2022. By FY2025, it had fallen to around 1.2 lakh an 80% decline in three years. Globally, over 55,000 tech workers lost their jobs in just the first three months of 2026 alone. TCS cut 12,000 employees. Oracle laid off 10,000-plus. Infosys terminated hundreds of trainees. And nearly every company making cuts has cited the same reason: AI is replacing the work that entry-level employees used to do.
This is not another post-pandemic correction. This is structural. And it is happening right now, to the batch you are in.
But here’s the thing this is also not the end. People are still getting hired. Companies are still posting jobs. The path is narrower, but it exists. And the students and freshers who understand what’s actually happening are the ones finding their way through.
This guide is for them.
What Has Actually Changed (And Why)
The jobs that AI is replacing aren’t random. They’re specific. Basic software testing. Routine code reviews. Standard content writing. Entry-level customer support. Template-based data entry. These were historically the first roles freshers stepped into not because they were easy, but because they were learnable on the job with minimal prior experience.
AI is now doing most of that work faster and cheaper. A 2025 analysis by EY estimated that entry-level IT roles in India have already declined by 20–25% due to automation. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that employment for young software developers in the US fell by nearly 20% between 2022 and late 2025. The pattern is the same everywhere: AI hits junior roles first.
NASSCOM reported that workforce growth in India’s tech sector slowed to just 2.3% in FY26, even as industry revenues continued to rise. Translation: companies are making more money but hiring fewer people because they need fewer people to produce the same output.
If your job search strategy is built on the assumption that the market works the way it did in 2022, it won’t work. The playbook has changed.
What Has NOT Changed (And Why It Matters)
Before you spiral, here’s the other side of the data.
Overall fresher hiring in India grew 8% year-on-year in January 2026, according to Naukri’s JobSpeak Index. That growth just isn’t coming from the places students have traditionally expected.
The sectors actively hiring freshers right now:
BPO and ITES: Fresher hiring in this sector rose 39% year-on-year in January 2026. Foreign MNCs are expanding BPO operations in India heavily Jaipur and Ahmedabad alone saw 66% and 43% growth in hiring. These are real roles with real salaries and faster growth than most people give them credit for.
Real estate and construction: Up 42% for entry-level roles. Sales, operations, customer relationship management not glamorous, but high-volume and hiring.
Insurance: Up 35% for freshers. With India’s insurance penetration still low, companies are expanding sales and support teams consistently.
Hospitality and travel: Up 33%. If you’re open to operations, front office, or management roles, this sector is actively onboarding freshers.
Healthcare (non-clinical): Healthcare in India is growing at roughly 16% CAGR. Hospital administration, medical coding, pharma sales, health informatics, clinical research coordination none of these require a medical degree, and all of them are hiring.
Logistics and e-commerce operations: Delhivery, Amazon, Flipkart, and dozens of logistics companies are hiring operations and analytics roles constantly. Every city with a distribution centre has open positions.
AI/ML roles: Here’s the irony while AI is eliminating some entry-level roles, AI/ML positions themselves saw a 34% hiring surge. The students who are moving toward this space are seeing the opposite of what the broader market is experiencing.
The honest truth the IT services model of “hire 50,000 freshers, train them for 3 months, bill their hours to clients” is mostly over. But the economy is still creating jobs. They’re just spread differently.
The Specific Things Freshers Should Do Right Now
1. Stop Waiting for Campus Placements to Save You
Campus placements have stabilised at around 40,000 per year flat, with no growth. At many colleges, fewer than 25% of graduating students have secured offers by the time their course ends. If your entire plan is to wait for a company to walk into your college, you’re depending on a system that is no longer absorbing the volume it once did.
Start your own search in parallel. Apply directly, reach out to companies, build a profile on job portals. Don’t wait for placement season.
2. Expand What You Consider a “Good” First Job
A lot of freshers are holding out for a specific kind of role usually IT, usually at a recognisable company, usually at a salary they’ve seen someone else get on LinkedIn. In 2026, that bar is leaving a lot of people unemployed for longer than necessary.
Your first job is not your forever job. It’s your entry point into professional life. A year in operations at a logistics startup, or in inside sales at an insurance company, teaches you more about how businesses work than a year of waiting for the perfect IT offer. And once you’re inside, you can move sideways, upward, to a different company, to a different domain. You cannot move from the outside.
Broaden your target. The data shows there are real openings across real sectors. Go where the hiring is.
3. Add One AI-Adjacent Skill to Whatever You’re Already Doing
You don’t need to become a machine learning engineer. But you do need to show that you understand and can work with the tools that are reshaping your field. This looks different depending on your background:
- If you’re in tech: learn to work with AI coding assistants, prompt engineering, or a specific ML framework like TensorFlow or Hugging Face
- If you’re in marketing: learn to use AI tools for content, analytics, and campaign automation and more importantly, learn to evaluate and edit their output
- If you’re in HR or operations: understand how AI-assisted screening and workflow automation works
- If you’re in finance: learn how AI tools are being used in forecasting, compliance, and reporting
One relevant skill, used in one real project, mentioned concretely in your resume, separates you from the majority of applicants who are still listing generic skills.
4. Apply Earlier and More Than Feels Comfortable
The competition for each open role has more than doubled since 2022, according to LinkedIn data. That means the same application that might have got you an interview two years ago now competes with twice as many candidates.
The response? Apply more. And apply faster.
When a job gets posted and you apply on day one when there are 10 applications you get a fundamentally different level of attention than when you apply on day ten when there are 200. Recruiters read early applications carefully. They skim late ones.
This is where EasyPlace directly helps you. Jobs listed on EasyPlace are freshly posted and updated regularly they’re not stale listings that have been sitting on a board for three weeks with 500 applicants already. When you find a role on EasyPlace and apply immediately, you are genuinely among the first few responses that recruiter sees. That is a real advantage. Use it.
The Handpicked Jobs section on EasyPlace is especially worth checking every time you visit. These are manually verified openings screened for legitimacy, relevant for freshers and students, no ghost listings. Apply to every single one that is anywhere near your field. Don’t filter too hard. Don’t talk yourself out of roles that feel like a stretch. As a fresher, your goal right now is to get into the room domain, company, and role refinement comes later.
5. Don’t Only Apply Through Portals
Job portals matter, but they’re not the whole game especially in a competitive market. Reach out directly to hiring managers on LinkedIn. Email companies you want to work at, even if they haven’t posted an opening. Ask seniors from your college who are already placed if their companies are hiring.
One warm introduction or one direct message that gets a reply is worth twenty portal applications in terms of actual conversion. In a tough market, the people who are reaching out directly are the ones breaking through. (See our guide on cold outreach if you need help writing those messages.)
6. Build Something. Anything.
In a market where companies are selective and receive hundreds of applications, the single most differentiating thing a fresher can show is a real project. Not a certification. Not a CGPA. A thing you built, that exists, that solves a problem, that you can talk about.
It doesn’t have to be impressive. A small tool, a simple app, a data analysis of a dataset you found interesting, a marketing campaign you ran for a college club. The point is that it’s real and you can describe exactly what you did, what problem it solved, and what you learned from it.
Companies hiring in 2026 are screening for evidence of doing, not just studying. Give them that evidence.
The Mindset Shift That Actually Helps
There’s a version of looking at the current job market that is purely demoralising. The numbers are bad. The competition is real. AI is changing things faster than anyone predicted.
But there’s another version, which is more accurate and more useful: this is the market. It’s the same market for everyone graduating right now. The question is not whether it’s fair it isn’t, particularly. The question is what you do inside of it.
The freshers finding jobs in 2026 are not dramatically more talented than the ones who aren’t. They’re applying earlier. They’re applying to more things. They’re looking at sectors that aren’t the obvious ones. They’re reaching out directly. They’re showing concrete work instead of just credentials.
None of that is out of reach for you.
Where to Start Today
Go to EasyPlace and open the jobs page. Lower your filters. Apply to the Handpicked listings. Apply to roles that feel like a stretch. Apply today, not after you’ve updated your resume one more time.
The market is harder. But you are not stuck. You just need to move.
