Areti Stabelou, from Athens, has been unemployed since she and 24 colleagues were made redundant from their call centre jobs in July. She didn’t like the work; it was hard and drained her energy. “I was just there for the money – it didn’t give me anything else,” she says.

It’s one of a series of short-term, low-skilled roles the 28-year-old has held since graduating university with a degree in political science in 2011. She hasn’t been able to find anything better.

“I would like to do something creative. When I first left university I wanted to work in political analysis or for a non-profit,” says Stabelou.

But when her parents moved out of the city, she needed an income to live on. “I had to support myself and find any work I could.”

Greek millennials currently face one of the toughest job markets in the developed world. The youth unemployment rate of 40% has been much discussed in coverage of the Mediterranean nation’s almost decade-long financial crisis, but less reported is the issue of underemployment. Those who do manage to find a job often find themselves, like Stabelou, trapped in one tenuous, low-skilled job after the next. The minimum monthly salary – which most graduates earn – has dropped from 800 euros ($920) to 600 euros ($690) since the start of the crisis, and one in four young people are classed as living in poverty. It’s one of the reasons around 250,000 graduates have left Greece to seek work in other countries over the past eight years.