Meet the 20-year-old CEO who launched a company in high school to solve Gen Z’s entry-level job crisis

For most teenagers, earning a driver’s license at 16 is a milestone of independence. It grants them the liberty to drive to a friend’s house on their own time, to see a movie, and to skip the bus to school. For Connor Vukelich, at 16, it was the catalyst for launching his business. After earning his driver’s license in high school, Vukelich was looking for a job. But he and his friends all kept running into the same problem: it was nearly impossible to find one. Most were being out-competed by senior-level applicants, applying to “ghost jobs,” and going through interviews just to get ghosted by employers. Frustrated by this experience, Vukelich created Poppin’ Jobs, a platform that specifically targets U.S. job seekers between 16 and 24. It currently hosts a database of 100,000 potential job seekers. Vukelich built the platform as an alternative to legacy job boards, which he said tend to prioritize senior-level talent, focusing instead on a demographic that requires more specialized guidance. “That made us think, why isn’t there a site dedicated to helping entry-level people getting into the workforce?’” Vukelich told Fortune about his conversations with friends at the time. “More specifically, Gen Z, getting us into the workplace and helping walk us through the process of doing it because it’s something we’ve never done before” The job market today is growing less favorable by the day for those looking to gain a footing in an entry-level position. AI threatens to wipe out large swathes of the entry-level job market. It’s a view shared by Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, who thinks will happen within 18 months, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned it will impact half of entry-level white-collar workers (though he recently tempered those remarks). A recent Anthropic study found that AI is already theoretically capable of automating the majority of tasks in management, business, finance, law, and other white-collar indust