When Hans Romine finished his architecture degree in 2025, the 24-year-old began looking for work. After about 50 job applications yielded a single interview appointment, he started feeling despondent.
That’s when a friend told him about a new show called 877UNMPLYD.
The show is on Twitch, a streaming platform favored by gamers and fans, but has an unlikely host: Jeremy Zimmer, the former CEO of United Talent Agency, along with digital-savvy producer Rachel Braun. The show offers career advice, discusses labor market news, and fields live call-ins from people looking for work.
When Romine called in, he mentioned he’d spent a few months as a recreation supervisor, building morale at an isolated research station in Antarctica. Zimmer and Braun found that the most interesting part of his whole story, and told him to play it up in applications and interviews.
Romine took their advice, and when he went in for that interview, he highlighted his experiences out on the tundra. After he landed the job, he called back in to let the hosts know.
That’s the kind of win Zimmer and Braun hope to replicate. Over their first season, the duo hosted 12 episodes, with one episode filmed live on the streets of New York garnering over 54,000 views.
The show is a small experiment in career guidance at a moment when the entry-level job market is getting harder to navigate — especially in New York City. A new report from Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business advocacy group, found that the number of entry-level jobs has shrunk disproportionately among professions highly exposed to AI; entry-level postings in design, media, and writing fell by 40.6%.
Nationally, employment in white-collar industries has fallen, even as output has gone up — indicating that AI might be effectively replacing entry-level white-collar work.
That dearth of entry-level opportunities is part of what spawned the show, a partnership between TikTok savant Adam Faze and the economic mobility nonprofit Schultz Family Foundation. Judith Dubin, the head of content at the foundation, said that they’d drilled down on investments in career navigation after recognizing how difficult it is to be graduating from high school or college into the current 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 set up a desk on a plaza at Baruch College, with a sign that said “Ask a CEO,” and fielded questions from students. One student asked for advice on how to negotiate salary expectations, especially in the interview process. Braun said that not all advice-seekers are new grads: One Gen X marketer called in after being laid off, feeling pushed out of the tech industry.
Going into the show, Zimmer focused on what it must feel like when getting a job is no longer as simple as putting your head down, working hard, and expecting things to work out.
“That age-old mantra doesn’t feel as relevant today,” Zimmer said. He’s been struck by the contrast between callers who are hyper-focused on what they want, eschewing any concern about why that can’t happen, and those who are baffled that they’ve applied for hundreds of jobs and haven’t gotten any interviews. He’s found both the naivety and the determination of the callers exciting.
Braun, the show’s other host and a producer, said that AI emerged as a major theme throughout their first season — both the opportunities it presented and the way that it was shaking up the entry-level job hunt.
Romine, who landed a job, hopes that employers can once again understand the value of having fresh talent on their teams. But as the labor market continues its entry-level contraction, getting a leg up — even if it’s through advice on a Twitch show — is ever more important.
“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,” Romine said.
