Pasadena, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/06/2011 -- The Labor Department in a report released last week has said that there are at least one million Americans now who have exhausted their unemployment benefits.

These one million Americans have still not being able to find work in a sign that shows how tough the labor market is at the moment. There were another 8.2 million unemployed Americans who were getting unemployment benefits for the week ending April 9. A year ago, the figure stood at 10.5 million Americans.

Another factor hurting the economic recovery is the fact that college graduates are not getting jobs in their fields or even jobs that actually require a college degree. A study done by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University estimates that there are 1.94 million graduates under the age of 30 who are in jobs that do not require a college degree.

The study estimates that at present, only 60 percent of college graduates are in jobs that require a college degree. The scenario is unlikely to improve for most of the 1.7 million students who are going to graduate with an undergraduate degree in a few months. Another 687,000 students will graduate with their masters’ degree.

Hound CEO A. Harrison Barnes says that applying to smaller and midsized firms directly can help recent college graduates. Hound is a job search engine that searches for job listings directly from employers’ websites. The site has been able to find 206,000 job listings all over the country from employer websites.