Shrika Vangipuram is a fourth-year engineering and commerce student at Monash University, specialising in AI. She's the COO of Monash Automation, a student robotics and manufacturing team of about 160 people, she works three days a week as an AI compliance officer at a startup that automates compliance work for hospitals and care homes, and she has two engineering internships lined up: Deloitte this summer, EY next year. Her LinkedIn profile has no description and almost nothing on it. That last detail turned into one of the best stretches of the episode.

Getting those internships took, by her count, more than 500 applications across two years. She tailored a resume and cover letter for every one. What came back was almost nothing: no personalised feedback, which she says is expected, but barely any rejection emails either. Her line for it: I don't even remember who got back to me.

We talk about what older generations get wrong about hers. Her answer starts with the assumption that using AI to work efficiently is laziness, and lands somewhere sharper. Engineering still screens on a high WAM or GPA, and she knows people with real knowledge and real projects who get put to the side because they're not good at exams. Her view is that in this day and age your grades shouldn't matter as much as they still do, and that what you've built shows more than a number on an exam paper.

Then the LinkedIn question. She is, in her words, very introverted, to the point she'd rather be alone than with people. Posting about herself is daunting. She created a profile because every company asks for one, and what holds her back is the fear of looking like the people who post for the sake of it or make their achievements out to be different from what they are. She doesn't want to give off the wrong impression. If you screen candidates by how they show up online, that answer is worth ten minutes of your time.

The moment I keep coming back to is from an in-person assessment. She'd been told which team she was interviewing for, looked it up, and found next to nothing. Halfway through, the interviewer stopped her and said they didn't think she actually knew what job she'd applied for. That was after doing her research. Compare it with the employer who phoned her before her interview to explain the role and the team, so she walked in with questions to ask. Her fix doesn't need a budget: a collated list of what each team actually does, in text, before the interview starts.

We close on what made her feel seen. One company she didn't get into gave her detailed feedback, pointing to the moments she'd done well. And any employer that sends even one sentence acknowledging she was there on the assessment day makes her feel her effort was noticed.

Her quickfire answers include one I hadn't heard on the show before: the platform she'd use to research an employer is an AI tool, because it can pull together what a specific team does from across the web in a way a website can't.

If you run early careers for an engineering or technology employer, this one was recorded for you.

This is Episode 10 of the Future of Work Voices Podcast.

Meika Kennedy is the student every careers adviser holds up as the model. Two scholarships, a peer mentor at Griffith University, at networking events whenever they're on, volunteering with Vinnies once a month, secretary of a 70-member orchestra band she plays clarinet in, and a cafe job at a hospital on top.

She was in the first cohort to take Griffith's Bachelor of Cybersecurity, she graduates next year, and she wants to work in defence and government. And when we recorded, she was in the middle of the internship hunt, two online interviews deep in a single week.

That gap is the episode. Everyone tells her cyber has so many jobs. From where she sits, the jobs are there for people at the middle level who've already done a graduate program. Entry-level positions like internships are, in her words, extremely competitive at the moment.

Those two interviews are worth hearing about. A big bank had her record three-minute videos of herself answering each question. A cyber company put her through an AI-guided skills test that felt like games: pattern recognition, maths, statistics, reading graphs. She preferred the games, and her reason is one every TA team should hear. By the fifth re-recorded video you're sick of staring at yourself and hearing your voice, and you start wondering whether it's even a good representation of who you are.

Then the part I didn't expect. Stuck on a maths question, the thought in the back of her head was that someone else would open another browser, drop it into AI, get more right, get it faster, and take the job. She didn't. It would drive her crazy knowing she had. But the fear is real, she thinks a few people do open that tab, and she says it's tough for employers too, because it skews the results.

We get into what older generations get wrong about hers (the assumption that AI makes it easy, when the actual load is a cover letter written for every company, volunteering, workshops, grades and a life on top), why an automated rejection beats silence (she'd reapply as a graduate to the company that bothered to reply), and what she actually hears when an employer says it wants more women in cyber. Her first reaction was that it felt like an unfair advantage. Where she's landed now, and what would prove it to her, is the sharpest stretch of the conversation.

She also told me the employer at the top of her list has been there since a stand at a year 12 event, because she spoke to a person who worked there instead of reading a website. If you run early careers for a defence or government employer, this one was recorded for you.

This is Episode 9 of the Future of Work Voices Podcast.

Prakhar Krishnani is in his second year of economics at the University of Sydney, an international student who got here via Shark Tank reruns, a grandmother who didn't speak to him for two months when he chose commerce over the family's engineering, and a fighter jet economics lesson that won his dad over. He's also one of the most confident guests I've had on the Future of Work Voices Podcast, and he says the things most students won't say out loud.

His generation's reputation problem with recruiters? He puts it on AI, and he's blunt about the mechanism: cold DMs that read like a bot wrote them, coursework where 80% can be done with AI, and critical thinking quietly eroding underneath it all. "It's not their fault, but it's our fault as well."

Then, minutes later, he tells me AI is his generation's superpower, that with the right foundations he can do the job of 10 people. Both claims, same conversation. That tension is the whole episode.

We get into how he uses AI without letting it think for him: go hard on foundational knowledge first, use it to cut time, and rebuild its work manually even when that takes five or six hours, because otherwise the critical thinking goes. He reckons a chunk of his peers follow the same discipline, but the majority are fully dependent, and he names what that costs the employers who hire them: hire someone unskilled, realise it, lay them off, run the process again.

He also took me somewhere I didn't expect: candidates faking subcommittee roles and internships to get shortlisted, because background checks are weak and there aren't enough domain-specific opportunities to go around. And his answer on what TA teams get wrong lands hard: a WAM cutoff reads as commitment, but mental health, life at home and an unlucky unit coordinator all sit inside a grade. He clears the 80 they ask for. He still calls it unfair.

If you hire graduates, this one is a window into how the most ambitious end of Gen Z operates: how they research you, how they network around your front door, and what they've decided about you before you ever see an application.

Madison is the first guest who sits on both sides of the hiring relationship at once.

She's in the first year of a Master of Human Resources, after a bachelor in human rights, which she calls the other HR. She's also been at Bunnings since she was fifteen, and she's now a coordinator leading a team where nearly everyone is over forty. So she's been the applicant, she's run performance reviews, and she's about to walk into the profession that designs the processes she's been on the receiving end of.

That combination made this a different conversation. Most guests can tell me what an application process felt like. Madison can tell me that, and then tell me what she'd change when it's her decision.

We get into what employers actually communicate when they write a job ad. Her sharpest point is one I hadn't heard put quite that way before: when culture and family turn up in the same sentence, she reads it as a warning, not a welcome. Not because she thinks employers are lying, but because the family framing quietly excuses things. You help out. You do for family. In practice that can mean unpaid overtime, or one person carrying the work of three.

We talk about what good looks like from the other direction too. She describes the best interview she's had, which was half a conversation about hot dogs, and why that mattered: it let her see who she'd actually be working with, and it let them see her, rather than someone performing being interviewable.

Her point about employer websites genuinely surprised me. An out-of-date or incoherent careers site isn't a minor presentation issue to her, it's disqualifying, and it happens before an application ever starts. She goes to the website first, before Instagram, before anything else. If it looks neglected, she doesn't go further.

Underneath all of it is a simple idea she keeps returning to. The person doing the job isn't the piece of paper. It's the person who wrote it.

Madison also researches mental health discrimination in hiring, and she's spoken openly about being affected herself. We go there in the second half, and she brings the business case as well as the human one.

If you write job ads, run an early talent process, or own a careers page, this one is worth an hour.

Hosted by Elliott Cirkovic.

Bhavya has applied for more than thirty graduate roles. He hasn't had a single interview.I want to be clear about what that isn't. It isn't a student firing off the same resume thirty times. He tailors every application, gets his resume and cover letter reviewed by career advisors at UWA who tell him there's no debate, he should be getting shortlisted. Before an aptitude test he runs practice tests and generates extra questions with AI so he can time himself. Before video questions he does practice runs. He's done internships, including a data science and machine learning placement at a radio astronomy research centre where he took a model from 93 to 97 percent accuracy, and another at a multicultural services centre where he improved follow-up rates.He also applied twice for an unpaid university placement and was knocked back both times. His words: I have paid internship experience but I'm not able to land an unpaid internship now.When I asked him why he thinks it's happening, he said honestly, I'm really confused.Three things came out of this conversation that I think are worth sitting with if you run a graduate program.The first is eligibility. Bhavya is an international student, in Perth two and a half years, final year data science and business analytics at UWA. The morning we recorded, LinkedIn had put five or six graduate roles and vacation programs in front of him. He read one of the descriptions and thought, this is meant for me. Then he got to the line saying you have to be a citizen to apply. All five or six of them. If that's a hard requirement for your program, and for plenty of programs it genuinely is, then saying it at the top of the ad costs you nothing and saves him an afternoon.The second is what students believe is happening inside a video interview, which matters whether or not it's true at your company. Bhavya's understanding, and he's careful to say he's picked it up from conversations and online content rather than knowing for certain, is that AI does the first cut, and that if you don't say the right keywords no human ever sees you. So candidates memorise keywords. Here's his point, and it's sharper than most of the commentary I read on this: you end up with a screen full of scripted answers, and you still can't tell who actually wants the job. He's describing a belief that's shaping behaviour at scale. That belief is now part of your process whether you built it or not.The third is feedback, and he's realistic about it. He knows the volume makes individual feedback hard, and he isn't asking for a written report. He's asking which part to fix. Is it the resume, the cover letter, the problem solving, the communication? Without that, he prepares for application thirty-one exactly the way he prepared for application one. Some employers have sent him an unsuccessful email. Others have simply gone quiet.We also got into how he checks whether a company's culture claims are real, which is not by reading the careers page. He found two people who actually work there as interns and asked them directly. And he made a point about career progression I hadn't heard put quite this way: graduate ads describe the two year rotation in detail and then stop. Nobody tells him what year five looks like. He said if a company spelled that out, he'd prioritise that application over the others sitting in front of him.One quiet moment is worth catching. He assumes employers rate student club experience above part time work, and he's not sure that's right, because in his view the part time job taught him more. He supervised a team at Subway while studying full time. Whether or not he's reading you correctly, it's shaping what he puts on a resume.This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to hear how their hiring process actually feels from the other side.

Manesh tutors primary school kids on the side. He told me that teaching a seven-year-old to add numbers taught him something about how employers hire.

When you're an adult, addition is so obvious you forget it ever had to be learned. Then you sit with a year-two student and realise how much you'd been assuming. He thinks recruiters do exactly the same thing to graduates.

This episode is a conversation with Manesh Tan, a mechanical engineering student at UWA who's been through the internship application grind himself. What he describes isn't a complaint. It's a map of the small, fixable things that quietly push good students away.

Here's the pattern he named, and it's one I see constantly across the employers I work with. Recruiters build their processes for people who already know the system. The terminology, the unwritten rules, what a vague job description is actually asking for. But the student is decoding all of that at the same time as applying. In his words, half the time he doesn't know what to expect, and the job description that's meant to explain everything often explains nothing.

Then it gets worse after they apply. He talked about being left dangling for months, ghosted by big companies, not even sure his application had gone through. A single automated update, we're still processing this, it'll be a few weeks, would fix it. He also pointed to something almost no one standardises. Inconsistent requirements. One role wants a cover letter, the next doesn't. One wants an academic transcript or a recommendation letter, the next doesn't. So the student is left asking am I sending too much, am I sending too little, on top of the stress of wanting the job in the first place.

Then he gave me two of the cheapest fixes in hiring I've heard.

The first. Put a name on the email. Most automated messages come from the recruitment team. A few come from an actual named person. That one change makes a student feel there's a human behind the screen.

The second is for smaller employers who think they can't compete. Manesh is tired of hearing there are so many jobs out there and then finding the same big names everywhere he looks. He wants fresh faces. Small companies don't need a big networking budget to be visible. They need to be findable online and willing to show up. The students are bored of the giants and actively looking for someone new.

If you own any part of a graduate application process, this episode is a list of things you could fix on Monday, most of them for free.

This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to hear how their hiring process actually feels from the other side.

Jacob rows. He told me the thing he likes about it is that the returns are linear. Do the work and the number on the erg gets better. You might start out an athletic freak, but the people willing to work harder will catch you eventually.

Then he started applying for graduate roles, and none of that held.

This episode is a conversation with Jacob Armes, a third year Commerce student at UWA in Perth, finishing at the end of this year and in the middle of grad applications right now. He isn't bitter about any of it. He went out of his way, more than once, to say he understands why the system works the way it does. That's what makes what he said land harder.

Here's the line I keep coming back to. He said it stings to get cut off a CV before anyone has seen your face or heard your voice. Not the rejection itself. The fact that the decision got made before a single person knew what he was like.

By the time we spoke he'd been through both kinds of interview. The recorded video interview he called a different beast. Weird, talking to yourself into a camera, and it took him a few practice runs to get anywhere near comfortable. Then one in-person interview, his first ever for a graduate role. He told me walking through the doors was the hardest part of the whole thing, and the second he started talking he was fine. He'd decided beforehand that he wasn't going to memorise answers. He'd be honest and let his character do the work.

That's the whole problem in one story. The version of him that would have won the room never got the chance to be in it.

He knows the maths, by the way. He raised it himself before I could. The firms are big, the recruiting teams are small, the application numbers are enormous. I told him what it looks like from the employer side, that a graduate program can pull thousands of applications with three or four people managing the entire process. Nobody is phoning everyone. Filtering has to happen somewhere.

But there's a difference between filtering and never being seen. What he asked for wasn't a longer process or a guarantee. It was two minutes. Two minutes for someone to hear how he thinks and why he wants the role.

We also got into how he actually uses AI, which is not what most employers assume. He had a derivatives unit last semester with some high level maths he was struggling with, so he'd drop practice questions in and work through them step by step, then ask for another one like it, then another. Getting reps in, he called it. A coach, not a shortcut. And he doesn't think he's unusual for it. Meanwhile employers are watching candidates read answers off a second screen in video interviews, and you can see it happening live. Same tool, two completely different students, and most processes right now can't tell them apart.

Then there's the thing he wants that almost nobody builds for. Stability. He's interested in the entrepreneurial side, he just doesn't want it yet. He wants a first role, a foundation, something to fall back on before he tries anything else. His words: get my foot in the door, start building that experience, and maybe spread out later. If you've been told this generation won't commit to anything, he's worth forty minutes of your time.

This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to hear how their hiring process actually feels from the other side.

I keep hearing the same complaint from employers: this generation of applicants must be lazy, because every application looks identical now.

This episode is a conversation with Kristian Agena, a final-year computer science student at UWA and an international student from the Philippines, who did a software engineering internship back home. He's applying into one of the toughest graduate markets tech has seen, and he explained what's actually going on underneath the sameness employers are frustrated by.

His argument stuck with me: candidates aren't lazy, they're overwhelmed. Recruiters are sifting thousands of applications, so students are told to blanket apply, and when you're applying to that many roles, AI becomes the only realistic way through. The uniformity employers see is a system output, not a character flaw.

We also got into the bar rising for graduates entering under AI, why he feels he's constantly having to prove his value, what made his internship actually feel like belonging (a flat hierarchy and being treated like an employee, not a temporary intern), and a challenge back to employers: there's a fine line between automating your hiring and staying fair to the people in it, and you have to protect the second one.

If you hire graduates, this one will change how you read the pile of applications in front of you.

This is the Future of Work Voices Podcast, for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to understand how Gen Z really thinks, from the people living it.

I asked a final-year student what he and his peers actually want from a graduate job. I expected him to say pay. He didn't.

This episode is a conversation with Taranpreet Singh, a final-year accounting and finance student at UWA who interned at PwC in private tax. He's the kind of candidate every Big Four firm is competing for, so what he values is worth listening to closely.

What he told me reframed the way I think about graduate retention.

His generation doesn't pick a first employer for the salary. They pick it for the growth, and not growth for its own sake. Growth so that, in his words, "anything that happens in the job market, you always have a backup plan with you." They're choosing a first job based on how well it prepares them to leave it. The reason is AI, and a job market they don't trust to look the same in five years.

We also got into something I didn't expect to change my mind on. Taranpreet thinks AI kills creativity. I disagreed, and then he explained it better than I could have. AI gives you the answer that already exists, so it can't crack a genuinely new problem. The skill his cohort is deliberately protecting is the judgement to know where to stop trusting it. That's exactly the skill employers should be hiring for.

And he shared a form of flexibility most employers have never thought to offer: the option to take public holidays that match your own culture and religion, not just the standard calendar. For him, that one thing signalled belonging more than any salary number could.

If you hire graduates, this one will shift how you think about what you're actually selling them.

This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who need to understand how Gen Z really makes decisions, from the people making them.

When I asked a KPMG-bound graduate what her internships taught her, she didn't start with a skill. She started with a fear.

She told me that when she began at EY, and then KPMG, she genuinely believed one mistake would cost her the graduate offer. One wrong number in an Excel spreadsheet, and it was gone.

This episode is a conversation with Mannat Uppal, a third-year UWA student who interned at both EY and KPMG and walked away with a graduate offer. What she shared is one of the clearest windows I've had into what early-career fear actually does to a person.

Here's the part employers need to sit with. That fear changes how feedback lands. When you correct a graduate on something small, you might see a minor note. They can hear a verdict on whether they get to stay. The gap between those two readings is where a lot of early talent quietly disengages.

Mannat worked her way out of it by realising something simple. The people correcting her were human, they'd made their own mistakes, and a wrong cell in a spreadsheet wasn't the end of anything. The skill she was really building wasn't technical. It was the ability to take feedback as instruction, not insult. That skill is far more valuable to you than a graduate who never gets a number wrong, and it's the one most employers do nothing to develop.

We also talked about how she went from shy to social by deliberately putting herself in discomfort, applying for university clubs, getting rejected, and going back again. And she named the two things her cohort is most nervous about right now. Their grades, and what AI does to their jobs in five to ten years.

The moment that matters most for employers is smaller and easy to miss. Mannat explained why so many vacationers coast through an internship. When a student thinks they're only there for four weeks and might not be asked back, they switch off and stop learning. She did the opposite, on purpose. But most won't. If you treat an intern as temporary, they'll behave like it. Treat them as someone you're genuinely assessing to keep, and you get a different person entirely.

If you run an internship or vacationer program, this one will change how you frame those four weeks, and how you deliver a single piece of feedback.

This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to understand how Gen Z really experiences early career, from the people living it.