There are 19 applications for every entry-level job, as the number of low-skilled positions dry up, research from welfare organisation Anglicare has found.

Entry-level jobs make up just 10 per cent of all job ads, and young people are particularly hard hit, Executive Director of Anglicare, Kasy Chambers, told Hack.

There are just not enough jobs to go around.

"We get into a Catch-22: if you haven't got experience it's very had to get an interview or a job and if you haven't got a job, it's very hard to get experience," she said.

"They're the canaries in the coalmine, young people, because they often have the least experience."

The youth unemployment rate is currently 11.7 per cent, more than double the overall rate, which is 5.3 per cent.

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Ms Chambers said age, living with a disability and experiencing long-term unemployment are some of the biggest barriers to finding work.

"If you have not got any qualifications or recent work experience and you are looking for one of these [entry-level] jobs, you'll be competing with at least five other people with similar barriers to work," she said.

In other words, there are at least five job seekers for every-entry level, low-skilled position. Jobs like labourers, kitchen hands, salespeople and clerical workers.

But the situation could be even worse depending on where you live.

"The situation is toughest in South Australia and Tasmania. In SA, nine of these jobseekers are competing for each suitable job. And in Tasmania, a staggering fourteen jobseekers competing for each of these jobs," Anglicare's job snapshot report said.

But those figures are based solely on the number of jobseekers at each level who are looking for work through employment services or are on unemployment benefits (which require actively looking for work in order to receive payments).

It also doesn't account for higher skilled people who may be looking for entry-level jobs to supplement their existing jobs.

Ms Chambers said the estimates are "conservative", and in fact many more people are looking for entry level work.

We saw that employers who were advertising for these entry-level jobs were seeing 19 applications for each of these roles.

"So there's a lot of competition. And if you don't have experience it's really hard for your application to stand out," she said.

'A grim situation'

Every year Anglicare analyses official government and departmental information, job ads and data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to make up its jobs snapshot. This year, they chose to analyse the month of May, as it was outside seasonal job changes over Christmas, for example.

The snapshot found entry-level jobs have been decreasing over time. In 2006, these kinds of jobs made up 22 per cent of overall job ads. Now, they're just 10 per cent.

"Those jobs that require a bit less from people on their way in [to employment] are really, really decreasing, and that's scary," Ms Chambers said.

"It's not a pretty picture out there if you're looking for jobs in general, but it's a particularly grim situation if you have some of those extra barriers which might make it a bit more difficult for you getting into the workforce."

Ms Chambers said jobs are becoming more complex, and employers are accordingly raising the bar on the qualifications they expect from job applicants.

This year, 50 per cent of all jobs advertised required a university qualification.

The jobs snapshot showed that more than half of all employers expected some kind of recent work experience, even for unskilled jobs.

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The end result of this is that people with barriers to work spend longer looking for a job.

"They spend an average of five years looking for work," the jobs snapshot said.

The Department of Employment last week told a Senate inquiry that the average amount of time someone receives the unemployment payment Newstart is 159 weeks, or 3 years.

"The rate of long-term unemployment has nearly doubled from 13 per cent in 2009 to 23 per cent," the jobs report said.

Ms Chambers said the Government needs to increase Newstart and Youth Allowance payments to account for the length of time it takes people to get work, and to reassess if the JobsActive employment services program is working as it should.

"The Government's emphasis in this area is on punishing people into a job - it's on breaching them, it's on drug-testing them, it's on lowering payments - and yet what our report shows is that the sheer mass of the fact that there aren't enough jobs for the people seeking those jobs."