How the Job Market Fell Into a Deep Freeze

Right now, unemployment is low, only around 4%, and the country added 165,000 jobs last month, beating expectations. In other words, the US is pretty much near full employment. The number of people filing for first time unemployment benefits fell to its lowest level since 1969 last week. I talked to someone looking for work, and you'll hear a different story. After applying for 324 jobs, getting 9 interviews and zero job offers, I'm convinced that I'm just destined to be homeless. And every single company that I have interviewed with has ghosted me. You call, they don't answer the phone, you send emails, they never respond to emails. You go up there. Our colleague Lindsay Ellis has been talking to people on the hunt for a job. I kept encountering people looking for work, who just kept hitting walls, and it felt in Congress almost with the jobs reports every month that had a low unemployment rate and jobs being created month after month. Is there a headline right now that describes the job market? Frozen is sort of the real word that sums this up. It's the ice cube economy. I like that. Maybe. People have jobs. A lot of people have jobs, and they're staying in those jobs. And I mean, I think this feeling of reluctance to make a move makes it more difficult for people who don't have work to break in. I mean, the people who graduate from college, grad school, or the people who are hit by layoffs or incentivized resignations, I mean, there are people entering the job market and there aren't a lot of empty seats to sit down at. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Friday, November 13th. Coming up on the show, how the job market fell into a deep freeze. As part of her work covering the labor market, Lindsay Ellis made it her mission to talk to job seekers in all 50 states. I wanted to really figure out how do I understand the nuance of this, of what's going on, of what it really takes to find a job these days, and how the systems that connect people to work are failing or succeeding. And so I kind of arbitrarily set a goal for myself last year. I'm going to talk to someone looking for work in every state. Lindsay spoke with a hundred job seekers across the country, and across a range of industries. How are people describing to you what it feels like to be job hunting right now? Oh, it's miserable. I mean, people just feel locked out. People have to jump through all sorts of hoops from assessments to one-way video interviews, but it's like, you're talking to an avatar. And then you never hear whether you get the job, don't get the job. If they ever filled the position, it's a lonely, demoralizing, isolating experience because there's just this lack of human contact, and they feel quite alone. Nearly two million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. A figure that's among the highest it's been in a decade. I've talked to many people who bagged groceries because they couldn't find other work. I talked to a military spouse in Alabama who was confronting ageism and trying to convince employers to hire her as someone over 60. I talked to a woman in Maine who has been a technical writer for many years, and that work just totally dried up because all of her companies were basically turning to clawed. In the course of a reporting, when she found one person in particular that stood out to her. As I was doing my 50 state effort, I had maybe ten states to go, and I was looking through Wall Street Journal commenters to see if there was anyone who mentioned looking for a job out of Utah, and I saw Jack had written in. I'm Jack. I grew up in Salt Lake City where I now live. I did my undergrad at Rice University in Houston in chemical engineering. I did my PhD at Princeton also in chemical engineering. How many times do you think you have answered the question, "Why do you want this job?" A couple hundred probably. That's Jack Weiss. On a whim, he left a comment on a Wall Street Journal article saying that he hadn't been able to find a job a whole year after finishing his degree, and it wasn't just him. Some of his former classmates were having the same experience. They even had a group chat where they would commiserate about it. I looked him up and I realized, you know, it's not just any PhD. It's a PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton. And if there's a group chat of guys there who can't find jobs, you know, something's happening. When he graduated in 2024, Jack didn't think he'd have much trouble finding a job in his field. Some of his research had already been recognized at a high level. He was even cited by the Nobel Committee when it awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. And I kid you not, his research was about ICE formations. So after you graduated, how did you expect your job search to go? Well, you know, I had some idea about some companies, so I kind of thought, you know, I'll reach out to, you know, some people who work at those places and we'll talk a little bit. And you know, we'll figure out which one seems like a good fit. And then I'll go work one of those places, pretty simple. But it didn't work out that way. After that didn't work, Jack started broadening his search to other industries, like consulting, business analytics, even a food prep job, but all of those roads led nowhere. Everywhere he turned, he kept running into the same dead end, the online application portal. When I see that work day like it's, you know, it's definitely hard not to get a little disheartened, much like playing lottery or something. I don't know that I have any expectation that that's going to go well at this point. And if you're lucky, you get rejected. If you're unlucky, you just, you know, you log in a few weeks later and find that your application is quietly updated to reject it without ever notifying you. The most common response I hear from job seekers is just silence. You know, it's not even a rejection. They are just getting nothing. And so, you know, the hours turn to days, days turn to weeks, weeks can turn to months. And it's this void of not even getting a reply from companies or other organizations. By Jack's count, in the two years since graduating, he's applied to over 2,000 jobs. Throughout this process, Jack has been living with his parents, using his savings and making money through an occasional freelance gig. But the more time passed, the more the search started to take a toll on him. I feel like if I could just talk to the right person with these companies, I could get them to understand what I could, you know, what I could bring to the table. But I'm not even, I'm not even getting that far. It seems to me as someone who talked to him multiple times over the last year that he was making an extraordinary effort here. This was not a guy who was sitting on his hands and waiting for an opportunity to come to him. I don't think the problem was lack of trying, you know, he was really casting a wide net and footprint here. If someone like Jack can't find a job, then like, who can? That was the question that really stayed with me. And the sort of extra layer to that question to you, which is that if someone with this guy's qualifications just accepts this as kind of the crummy reality of looking for a job in 2026, like what does that mean for the rest of us? Like this is what it's like out there. Over the course of a reporting, Lindsay found something else that surprised her, which is that even though all these people are looking for work, employers say they can't find anyone to hire. That's next. On Lindsay's quest to find out what was happening in the job market, she also wanted to understand what was happening on the other side, the companies who do the hiring. So in a word, employers are really cautious right now. They are looking at sort of a broader macro economic environment that has a lot of question marks. Everything from tariffs to geopolitical conflict makes them wonder what our costs going to be and what is demand going to be. As a result, when an employee leaves, some companies are just not backfilling their position. And then they're asking existing employees to take on more work, sometimes with the help of it. AI. I've talked to companies that basically say, yes, AI can do this now, but we don't know what it's going to be able to do six months from now. And so why would we bring someone on to the payroll full time in this moment when maybe six months from now we're going to regret kind of expanding headcount? And Lindsay says that when companies do post a job, they're overwhelmed with the number of applications they're getting. And job seekers are in an environment where they're not getting a lot of bites. They will turn to this math application spray, you know, to get their resume and materials in front of as many people as possible. And many of them are using AI to improve their resume, to kind of fit their cover letter or materials to the job description and submitting a ton of applications very quickly. One way companies are managing the avalanche of applications is by using AI to sort through them. I think it's partly this like needle in a haystack of when you get this application avalanche, you know, how are you going to find like the right person. And you know, I think there's a lot of concern from the employer perspective to about candidates sort of leaning on AI to inflate what they know. Lindsay also says the companies are having a harder time telling if candidates are actually even that interested in the job they're applying for. So I think there's been such a flurry of activity from the job seeker perspective that is sort of responding to the AI filters and, you know, the frozenness of the job market that it's like this bot versus bot robot war. And so was that mean the companies are then putting more like hurdles in place more hoops that potential candidates have to jump through? I definitely think that's part of it to kind of winnow this pool, you know, you have to do these assessments and do these one way video chats with robots and, you know, jump through all of these hoops, jump over all of these hurdles. And when it comes time to actually make a hire, companies are very picky about who they choose. They want to hire someone who can hit the ground running instead of someone who needs to be trained up. Something that I've heard from some career coaches and companies, which is that everybody's looking for a turnkey candidate. I mean, just like in the housing market, when you want the turnkey house, you don't have to do renovations, you can just move and ready. That's what people want in a job applicant these days. Why? Because I think of all of the uncertainties that we talked about. They want to make sure that when they hire someone, they're bringing on an individual who can hit the ground running and just immediately make contributions. Right. Because if they hire somebody that needs to be trained up and maybe as a long-term investment in six months or a year, they're going to be that also employee, the world may have changed so much that they might have trained them in the wrong direction. And this is presenting a problem, especially for people who are leaving graduate school or undergrad. You know, I think companies want to hire someone who directly has experience with what they are hiring for. And, you know, you're not taking as much of a bet on a candidate who is pivoting into a new role as much as you would have maybe five years ago. Ultimately. Lindsay says these issues are altering people's trust in the whole hiring process. The experience for looking for a job right now is so isolating and so lonely. And a lot of people are struggling as they go through it. And that pain and disillusionment, sometimes disillusionment with how this system works, sometimes we're broadly about kind of capitalism and opportunity. You know, that stays with people long after they do find a job. How can the job market get out of this deep freeze? I mean, that's definitely an open question. I mean, in my time at the journal, I have seen this shift from it being such a hot hiring market where students were getting job offers, sometimes even before they stepped onto a business school campus to, you know, these waves of tech layoffs as AI was really getting its foothold in to now this really frozen environment where both job seekers and employers feel like this hiring system is broken. And I'm really curious to see where things go from here. For Jack, he thinks that the current system in place isn't serving anybody. In all the comments I've seen since this article, I don't think I've seen one defending the way the current system works. And so I, you know, I hope people will be, will be open to the idea that this could be made to work better for both people like myself and for employers looking for people like me. Nobody, nobody benefits from people being on the, on the sidelines looking for jobs for multiple years, especially when it's just a result of kind of a system like this. So what's next for you? Hard to say, you know, since that, that article ran, I've gotten a number of promising leads really at a crazy variety of industries. My feeling right now is that my ideal is that, you know, I find a smaller company or reasonably autonomous doing something that matters if not that I, that I strike out on my own. That's all for today, Friday, November 13th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Evelyn Fajardo Alvarez, P.A. Gedcari, Sophie Coddner, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Amani Moeze, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez-DeLaRosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rodgers, Katie Sheppard, Piersinghi, Jiveka Verma, Tatiana Zemese, and me, Ryan Knudsen. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Nathan Singapok, and Blu-Dot Sessions. Fact checking this week by Nicole Pasolka. Thanks for listening. We have a special episode coming Sunday from our live event in Dallas. See you then.