Zohran Mamdani Gets 74,000 Job Applications: Sign Of Young New Yorkers Struggling To Find Work?
During his campaign, Mamdani promised to ease the cost-of-living burden in a city where rents remain elevated and wage growth has softened.
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has reportedly received more than 74,000 job applications for positions in his incoming administration. The numbers reflect both enthusiasm for his leadership and the difficulty many young residents face in finding work.
The average applicant is 28 years old, highlighting how sharply the employment squeeze is being felt among younger New Yorkers, according to a Bloomberg report.
Mamdani, 34, quickly rose from a little-known Queens assemblyman to mayor-elect, backed largely by young voters and volunteers. Many of them were struggling to find work, with unemployment among New Yorkers aged 16 to 24 at 13.2% in 2024, up 3.6 percentage points from 2019, according to a May report from the New York state comptroller, the Bloomberg report added.
The wider employment picture in the city remains fragile. City data shows that New York added around 25,000 jobs through September this year, a sharp slowdown compared with roughly 1.06 lakh jobs created over the same period in 2024.
During his campaign, Mamdani promised to ease the cost-of-living burden in a city where rents remain elevated and wage growth has softened. His transition team is now preparing to recruit staff across 60 agencies, 95 mayoral offices and more than 250 boards and commissions, with senior appointments taking priority, the report mentioned.
A typical New York City mayoral operation employs around 1,100 people, according to Ana Champeny, vice president of research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit finance watchdog.
Applicants for Mamdani’s administration span a broad range of experience levels and professional backgrounds, said Maria Torres-Springer, co-chair of the mayor-elect’s transition team.
Without referring explicitly to artificial intelligence, Torres-Springer said the Mamdani team would rely on “the typical technology that any big corporation would have in an applicant-tracking system” to filter resumes before matching candidates to suitable agencies.
“The average age does tell a particularly interesting story in two ways,” Torres-Springer said. “It might be because of volatility in the job market, but it’s also because I think we are attracting, the administration is attracting, New Yorkers who may not have considered government in the past.”
One such applicant is David Kinchen, a 28-year-old data engineer who relocated to New York from northern Virginia three years ago. After being laid off from a fraud-detection role, he said he has submitted more than 1,000 job applications and taken part in at least 75 interviews without securing an offer.
Kinchen volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign and later applied for a position within the administration, highlighting both his technical background and his interest in photography.
Another applicant, Aurisha Rahman, 22, said she has struggled to break into the workforce since graduating with a civil engineering degree. “The job market is even worse than it was last fall,” Rahman said, adding that Mamdani’s application portal was among the few she found that appeared open to entry-level candidates.
