Chart Storm: Three charts on the stark decline in summer job postings causing sky-high youth unemployment

Summer job postings in 2025 are behind recent years

Canada’s summer job market is off to a sluggish start in 2025. As of May 9, job postings on Indeed featuring the word “summer” (or “été” in French postings) in the title were down 22 percent compared to the same time last year. The drop signals that seasonal hiring is now falling in line with general job market declines that began in 2023.

The seasonal hiring cycle typically peaks between mid-April and mid-May, meaning the window for new summer job postings has effectively closed. With fewer opportunities available, Canadian students may be facing another tough summer on the job hunt.

Alex, a 19-year-old University of Toronto student, told The Hub that he applied to more than 200 summer job postings in the Greater Toronto Area, and despite having two years of experience working in commercial gyms and restaurants, he only received interview invitations from five of them. Alex was left with zero offers. Most of the jobs he applied for were entry-level retail or service jobs paying minimum wage.

“It is really tough when you want to work so badly, and save up money for school, but get denied over and over again because there just isn’t anything available,” he said. “It’s totally demoralizing.”

“When people are firing out 100, 200, 300, 400 cover letters and CVs and never really hearing back, even that the position has been filled, it does start to colour and characterize their relationship to work and pursuing work and their motivation,” Vass Bednar, executive director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy program, told Global News.

Long-time summer job staples are facing sharp declines

Jobs that were traditionally readily available to Canadian students and youth are now beginning to fade away. A summer staple for many Canadians was working as a camp counsellor. But job postings for counsellors are now down 44 percent. Painting jobs are down by 22 percent, as well as lifeguarding and customer service positions, though down by 8 percent.

In 2023, there were 149,300 camp counsellor jobs in Canada, according to the Government of Canada’s job bank. If a calculation was made using the 44 percent decrease in postings observed by Indeed, only 83,608 of those jobs remain in 2025.

Administration, summer associate, human resources, and operations jobs are also in decline. Another University of Toronto student, Jon, told The Hub that he submitted over 150 internship applications for these types of jobs across a wide range of industries, including media, banking, fashion, tech, and pharmaceuticals, in Canada and internationally. Jon applied for summer jobs on various platforms, including company portals and LinkedIn. Still, he came up empty-handed.

“Despite having a strong academic performance and prior experience at a Fortune 500 company, I found it incredibly difficult to even secure interviews. It was disheartening to put in so much effort and see so little return, especially when I believed my background would at least get me through the initial screening stages,” Jon wrote to The Hub. “It really highlighted just how competitive the internship landscape can be today, even for qualified candidates.”

Some experts cite market instability and higher costs as the core drivers for the decrease in job postings. Others argue that employers can be selective with hiring choices because of the massive applicant pool for summer jobs of all sorts.

“I think an employer right now can afford to be picky in hiring. They know plenty of applicants, really of all ages, are vying for each opening,” says Santo Ligotti, VP Marketing and Member Services at Retail Council of Canada, to Global News.

Nathan Janzen, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada, told the Globe and Mail that high interest rates have led many employers to attempt to get by during the summer months with fewer staff, and as a result, competition among summer job or internship job seekers is much fiercer than in recent years.

The unemployment rate for youth is double the national average

The unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 24 edged up to 14.1 percent in April 2025, marking a sharp increase from 12.9 percent a year earlier. After briefly dipping in the fall of 2024 and the late winter/early spring this year, youth unemployment has resumed its upward climb in the summer months of 2025, hitting just 0.1 percent under the two-year high rate.

The youth unemployment rate for 2024 and the year-to-date average rate in 2025 is approximately double the current national average for Canadians of all ages, 6.9 percent, and has been around double the national average every month since April of last year.