A Twitch Show Gives Job Hunters Advice From a Former CEO

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Hans Romine finished his architecture degree in 2025 and started looking for work. About 50 applications produced a single interview appointment, and the 24-year-old began to feel despondent. Then a friend told him about 877UNMPLYD, a new show on Twitch, the streaming platform favored by gamers.

The hosts are Jeremy Zimmer, the former CEO of United Talent Agency, and Rachel Braun, a digital-savvy producer. The show offers career advice, covers labor market news and takes live calls from people who are looking for work. In its first season the pair made 12 episodes, and one of them, filmed live on the streets of New York, collected more than 54,000 views.

A call that changed an interview

When Romine phoned in, he mentioned that he had spent a few months as a recreation supervisor at an isolated research station in Antarctica, where he worked on morale. Zimmer and Braun thought that was the most interesting part of his story and told him to play it up. He did, and he talked about his time on the tundra at the interview. After he landed the job, he called back to tell the hosts. They would like to repeat that kind of win.

A harder entry-level market

The show is a small experiment in career guidance at a time when entry-level work is harder to find, especially in New York City. A new report from Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business advocacy group, found that entry-level jobs have shrunk disproportionately in professions highly exposed to AI. Entry-level postings in design, media and writing fell by 40.6%. Across the country, white-collar employment has dropped even as output has gone up, a sign that AI may be replacing entry-level white-collar work.

The show is a partnership between Adam Faze and the economic mobility nonprofit Schultz Family Foundation. Judith Dubin, the foundation's head of content, said it had narrowed its investments to career navigation after seeing how hard it is to graduate from high school or college into today's labor market. "The current job marketplace is so disrupted with the advent of AI," Dubin said. "It's just an additional barrier for young people."

In August, Zimmer and Braun put a desk on a plaza at Baruch College with a sign reading "Ask a CEO" and took questions from students. One wanted to know how to negotiate salary expectations, particularly during the interview process. Braun said not everyone who asks for help is a new graduate. One Gen X marketer called after being laid off and feeling pushed out of the tech industry.

Zimmer went into the show thinking about what it feels like when getting a job is no longer a matter of putting your head down and working hard. "That age-old mantra doesn't feel as relevant today," he said. Some callers are hyper-focused on what they want and wave off any concern about why it cannot happen. Others are baffled that hundreds of applications have not brought a single interview. Zimmer finds both the naivety and the determination exciting, and Braun said AI ran through the whole season, both as an opportunity and as a force reshaping the entry-level search.

Romine hopes employers will again see the value of fresh talent on their teams. "In the meantime, students and graduates need to really figure out how to work the current system and make themselves stand out in such an intense market," he said.

Source: Business Insider