Despite the prevalence of AI in the national dialogue, its use among graduating seniors as a job-search tool is not as widespread as many believe as students have strong concerns about using AI, according to NACE’s 2025 Student Survey Report.

More than two-thirds of Class of 2025 graduating seniors participating in the survey (67.1%) said they did not use AI in their job search. Their reasons for not doing so primarily involved their concerns about ethics and expertise.

While 28.9% were concerned about the ethical implications of using AI in their job search, 24.6% reported they did not have AI expertise and 15.9% were concerned that a prospective employer would know they were using AI. Other reasons they cited for bypassing AI were environmental concerns, the belief that AI isn’t accurate or reliable enough, and their distaste for AI. (See Figure 1.)

Only one-third of responding Class of 2025 graduating seniors (33%) reported that they used AI in their job search, most often leveraging it to help with writing a cover letter (64.8%), preparing for interviews (63.8%), and creating a resume (61.6%). (See Figure 2.)

Perhaps, too, these graduates don’t believe having AI skills will be important to their future career: Despite all the buzz about AI and the future workplace, 28% believe it will be just slightly important or not important at all and one-third believe it will just be slightly important.

This comes as employers responding to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey report that just 13.3% of their jobs require AI skills and only 10.5% of their entry-level jobs include AI in their job descriptions.

Sixty-one percent of the responding employers firmly indicated they will not be replacing their entry-level jobs with AI, and none of the employers report having plans in place to make this change within the next five years.

That is not to say employers don’t see the utility in it; 11% say they will augment their entry-level jobs with AI within the next three years.

NACE’s 2025 Student Survey, sponsored by Indeed, was conducted April 1 through May 30, 2025; 13,684 college students, including 1,479 Class of 2025 graduating seniors at the bachelor’s degree level, took part. Participants can access the report and dashboard through MyNACE. The report and dashboard are also available in the NACE Store.

NACE collected data for its Job Outlook 2026 survey from August 7, 2025, through September 22, 2025. Of the 183 total respondents, 170 were NACE employer members, representing 22.7% of eligible member respondents. The Job Outlook 2026 survey was also distributed to nonmember companies; this group provided an additional 13 responses. Job Outlook 2026 is available on NACEWeb.

article by Kevin Gray at NACE. Source: Student Concerns About AI Tempering Their Use of It in Job Search