When Emily Bianchi attended a job fair as a sophomore in college, during the boom of the late 1990s, companies were vying for students’ attention and offering up swag. When she graduated two years later, after the dot-com bubble popped, it was a different scene. “There were probably only a third the number of companies,” she recalled, “and many were not hiring.”

That experience would eventually inspire Bianchi’s professional research as an associate professor of organization and management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. She spoke at From Day One’s Atlanta conference about how economic conditions in early adulthood influence later job attitudes, self-concepts, and other behavior.

“Does it matter if you first looked for work at a challenging time when it was very hard to get a job, and do you hold that with you for a really long time?” she asked the audience. “At this point I can confidently say yes.”

Bianchi has poured over years of government data sets, including the cross-sectional General Social Survey, to isolate “how bad the economy was doing when people first entered the workforce, and use that to predict how satisfied they were with their jobs today.”

The results are striking. “You do see a real difference,” Bianchi said, between young adults who graduate in boom and bust times, even if they’re just a few years apart. Graduates during a recession experience more instability, are more likely to take whatever jobs are available, and generally navigate more early career challenges. Graduates during a boom find well-paying jobs at a faster pace and higher rate.

Both these experiences have longer-lasting impacts on professional careers, she found. “Early adulthood is a very formative time for people,” she said. “You’re leaving your family of origin, making your way in the adult world. The conditions present at that time can shape who you are and who you become.”

She’s found that young adults who graduate during recessions tend to be more risk-averse and can have less confidence in their professional life. Bianchi has found positive impacts, too: they tend to be less narcissistic, more humble, and are often loyal and committed to the companies they work for.

Bianchi has also studied how economic fluctuations affect us on a larger scale. “I wondered, when you see fluctuations in the economy, do we become even more individualistic during good economic times–because there’s a feeling we can do anything–and more collectivistic during bad economic times? It turns out we do.”

This shifting perception impacts everything from what we name our children to what kind of music we listen to. “We see in the data that songs are more ‘I, me, my’-focused in good times, and ‘us, our’-focused in bad times, and we see this across other metrics as well.”

Bianchi also found a “dark side,” she said, to increased collectivism and interdependence during economic turbulence in the U.S. through an increase in racism: “White Americans’perceptions of Black Americans become more negative during recessions, and positive during good times.”

The research shows that economic conditions impact us deeply. So what can business leaders do with this research, especially when it comes to hiring new graduates? Companies who can hire during down times have an opportunity to find eager, committed employees. “They have an opportunity at that moment to snatch up some really fantastic people,” Bianchi pointed out. “That might not be true in another time, when you’re vying for those people.”

Companies and HR leaders should also be understanding of gaps in resumes during economic downturns. “Sometimes those resumes don’t look as fantastic as someone who graduated in better economic times,” she pointed out. “But again that poses an opportunity for organizations to snatch up some really good people who might not have the same kind of experiences they would have had if they graduated in a more fruitful job market.”

Bianchi is less sure what to make of our current times, marked by the pandemic, a social-justice movement, the Great Resignation, and quickly-evolving perceptions around work. “There are various factors that have not been present in the data to date,” she pointed out. Even though the economy is stronger than when Covid-19 first hit, “there’s still this pervasive sense of uncertainty that’s just different from other times when the economy is doing well.”

It’ll take five to 10 years for the data to bear out how these factors affect young people entering the job market, she said. “I just don’t think we know yet how it’s going to play out.”

Emily Nonko is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to writing for From Day One, her work has been published in Next City, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and other publications.