Sources & raw data · Video 03
Everyone repeats that entry level jobs demand three to five years of experience. Nobody counts. Here is our count, our method, our control group, and the five mistakes we made and fixed before publishing.
Taken 1 September 2026. One thousand listings tagged “Entry Level” by the employer who posted them — not by us — with the full text of each ad.
| Listings | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| State a required number of years | 53 | 5.3% |
| Require experience without giving a number | 225 | 22% |
| No stated experience requirement | ~722 | ~72% |
Among the 53 that give a number: median 1 year, mean 1.4, maximum 3 years (2 listings). None asked for five.
A fair objection: maybe employers tag anything “entry level”. So we ran the same measurement on the two levels above, same board, same employers, 500 listings each.
| Level chosen by the employer | State a number | No number, but required | Median | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry level | 8% | 32% | 1 year | 2 |
| Mid level | 23% | 11% | 2 years | 14 |
| Senior level | 56% | 10% | 7 years | 20 |
One, two, seven. The label is not noise — which is what allows the entry level figure to mean something. And five years does exist: it is the single most common requirement in senior listings, 69 of the 280 that state a number. The claim is real. It is attached to the wrong level.
Second finding, which nobody is angry about: entry level listings are three times more likely to be vague — 32% require experience without ever naming a figure, against 11% and 10% above. The beginner faces an unstated wall, not a numbered one.
Every one of them would have made the job market look harder than it is. Not one went the other way. We publish them because a sixth is likely.
| # | Real sentence | What we counted | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | “Must be 18 years of age or older” | 18 years of experience | exclude age |
| 2 | “Prefer 1 year of acute care experience” | a requirement | separate wish from requirement |
| 3 | “With more than 40 years of experience in office equipment” | 40 years demanded of the candidate | that is the employer's own age |
| 4 | “Must be 18+ years old” | 18 years of experience | age was not enough, old too |
| 5 | “Entry level for RNs with less than two years” | 2 years required | it is a ceiling, not a floor |
Mistake 3 alone pulled the mean to 9.2 years against a median of 3. Mistake 5 alone moved the headline figure from 7.6% to 5.3%.
All 54 matches, with the years found and a link to the listing itself. The video quotes three of them without naming the employer — the link is here so you can check.
| Years | Listing title | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | (USA) Technician, Facility Services, Irrigation Exterior Services | listing |
| 3 | New Graduate Engineer, Mechanical | listing |
| 2 | Accounts Receivable Clerk - Las Vegas, NV | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Hospital Collections Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 2 | Jr. Sous Chef - Temporary | listing |
| 2 | Jr. Sous Chef - Temporary | listing |
| 2 | Jr. Sous Chef - Temporary | listing |
| 2 | Multi-Site Security Officer | listing |
| 2 | Nurse Practitioner - Occupational Medicine NP | listing |
| 2 | Outpatient Registered Nurse - RN | listing |
| 2 | RN Staff Nurse (PER DIEM) | listing |
| 2 | Scrum Master - Entry Level | listing |
| 2 | Warehouse Security Officer | listing |
| 1 | (Entry Level) Production Technician - PCBA | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Associate Billing Representative - National Remote | listing |
| 1 | Bartender | listing |
| 1 | Dishwasher | listing |
| 1 | Field Assessment Registered Nurse, Bronx, NY - $10,000 Sign-On Bonus ( | listing |
| 1 | Global Operations Specialist | listing |
| 1 | Global Operations Specialist | listing |
| 1 | Global Operations Specialist | listing |
| 1 | Machining Technician (Starlink) - Entry Level | listing |
| 1 | Management Trainee - Rochester | listing |
| 1 | Mental Health Counselor Adolescent Psych PT Days | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Electrical (Starship) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Electrical - '26/'27 (Starlink) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Electrical - '26/'27 (Starlink) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Mechanical (Cape Canaveral) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Mechanical - '26/'27 (Starlink) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Mechanical - '26/'27 (Starlink) | listing |
| 1 | New Graduate Engineer, Propulsion (Raptor) | listing |
| 1 | Operations Specialist - Join Our Talent Community | listing |
| 1 | Patient Accounts Resolution Representative - Remote in MN or WI | listing |
| 1 | Patient Accounts Resolution Representative - Remote in MN or WI | listing |
| 1 | Per Diem Associate Patient Care Coordinator - Greensburg, PA | listing |
| 1 | Primary Care Advanced Practice Clinician (NP/PA), Portland, OR | listing |
| 1 | Starlink Production Technician - Entry Level | listing |
| 1 | Wait Staff | listing |
| 1 | Wait Staff | listing |
| 1 | Wait Staff | listing |
| 1 | Wait Staff | listing |
Job data comes from The Muse public listings API, which lets an employer tag a posting entry, mid or senior, and returns the full ad text (median ~4,900 characters).
We do not republish the ad texts. The Muse terms prohibit cloning their content, and a frozen copy would only let you re-read ours. Instead we publish the script: run it and you get your own thousand listings, from the day you run it, and you can contradict us with fresh data. That is a stronger form of the same promise.
recherche/etape2_offres.pyrecherche/donnees/etape2_temoin.jsonrecherche/12-mesure-entry-level.mdIt does not say the market is easy. 22% require experience without a number, and degrees, portfolios, referrals and unpaid internships close doors too — none of them measured here.
It does not say people are lying. A ridiculous listing exists; we measured how often, and that is all we measured.
One board, one country, one day. The Muse serves large US employers who care how their ads read — probably the ones writing the clearest listings. Our figure is a floor, not an average. Arbeitnow was tried as a cross-check and dropped: it is overwhelmingly German, with 2 junior listings in 175, so it would not have tested the same thing.
Added 2 September 2026, after publication: a weakness we found in our own sample. Those 1,000 listings come from 53 employers, and one of them, Walmart, posts 37.7% of them. They are also not 1,000 distinct texts: the same ad is reposted store by store, leaving 668 different descriptions. So we recounted three ways:
| Sample | State a number of years |
|---|---|
| As published in the video | 5.3% |
| Deduplicated by ad text | 5.5% |
| Deduplicated and excluding Walmart | 9.7% |
The conclusion holds in every split — median one year, maximum two to three, and not a single listing asking for five. And the instability the video already reported (5.3%, then 8.2% on a second draw) now has a cause we did not know while filming: which employers happen to be in the window. We cannot replace a published video. We can tell you what we found, and this is it.