The Bargain of Working Hard and Getting a Job Just Doesn't Hold Anymore

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In 2021, Zia graduated from the University of Michigan–Dearborn with a degree in software engineering. With an internship under his belt, he had no shortage of job opportunities, and he landed a contract coding gig in January of 2022. It was good work, for a year and a half, until he got laid off in mid-2023. After taking a month to figure out what he wanted to specialize in, Zia decided that he'd go for the types of app- and site-building jobs that had been so plentiful when he was in school.

“Then I started applying to jobs, and honestly, I don't even know what to say after that,” the now–29-year-old Pakistani American coder told me, calling from his parents' house in Taylor, Michigan. “Here I am right now, still applying to jobs two years later.” (Zia is a pseudonym; I've granted them in this article to people who didn't feel like they could otherwise speak freely without disrupting their ongoing job searches.)

Software engineering used to be a sure bet. “ Learn to code ” is, after all, used as a pejorative against people in famously less stable fields, like journalism . But for the past few years, it hasn't seemed to matter whether you did everything “right”—choosing the right major, getting the right experience, even spending decades in a field. Even after perfecting their summaries and sending out hundreds (if not thousands ) of applications , people on the job market today, of all ages, in all fields, are finding that they can't even land an interview , forget about full-time employment.

“It's just barren out there,” said a 42-year-old New Yorker and longtime artificial intelligence product manager whom I'll call Dave. Yes—even the supposedly booming field of AI is not hiring so madly these days. “I lost my job about a year ago at a company that had some issues, and I've put out so many applications,” he told me.

LaVonne Pepe, a former senior advisor on gender-based violence at Housing and Urban Development, was laid off from the advocacy nonprofit Color of Change in 2023. “I'd applied to literally hundreds of jobs, because the market was bad then,” she said. Pepe finally landed the job with HUD last fall—only to have his federal position terminated in February. Now she's back on the job market and “it's arguably worse now,” she told me. “Back then, more jobs were available in the field that I'm in. Now the funding landscape for those organizations is horrible.”

On TikTok, a burly Gen Z New Yorker who goes by “Rizz Carlton” earned oversize attention for a February video that he captioned, in part , “I've sent over 1,500 applications and haven't gotten 1 offer in 2 years … even with a masters degree & internships.” Now, the caption continues, he's “doing social media to pay the bills.”

“Unless you've been on a job search the last two years, you don't know how bad it is out here,” a Chicago-based techie named Syd wrote in the caption for a March TikTok that's racked up nearly 10 million views. “The job market is trash, basura , it’s been bad!”

A 24-year-old Los Angeles–based writer, teacher, and comedian who goes by Femcel1836 began sharing dispatches from her “ job search hell ” late last year before pouring out her frustrations in a January Substack essay titled “ WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? ” That post went viral, garnering hundreds of comments from like-minded users. One bemoaned that she'd been “suffering through this finding a job shit for the past 2 years”; another called this a “crisis” that was even “more severe” than the 2008 recession—otherwise known as the worst financial meltdown of the 21 ^st century.

Even experienced workers share the perception that this is the worst job market of their lifetime. “I've been laid off before,” Dave told me, meaning as he acknowledged that periods of looking for work are part of having a career. “But it's never been this hard to just get interest on a summary. Even during the Great Recession and COVID, there were fewer postings, but it was never this quiet .”

If you're looking for a job right now, it might feel hard to convey people who are happily employed just how rough things are. That's because the topline numbers about the job market are, for all the chaos in America, pretty rosy. The federal jobs report for April shows that unemployment is historically, persistently low, that jobs are being added almost continuously, and that there are millions of thousands of openings waiting to be filled. Even the measured percentage of “discouraged” and underemployed workers fell last month , as labor force participation increased overall.

Take a peek beneath those numbers—which, notably, do not yet include many federal workers cut in the DOGE bloodbath who are still receiving severance—and things look more concerning. That's particularly true for zoomers who went into the very industries that once promised solid, plentiful opportunities. An April 11 report from the think tank Employ America pointed out “the increasingly narrow scope of employment growth.” It found that job numbers have grown mainly in specific sectors, like private health care and education, along with local government. Meanwhile, tech, finance, and manufacturing have either slowed their new job offerings or shed opportunities altogether. The impacts of that penny pinching can be hardest on seniors (whose lengthy work experiences and accordingly high salary demands make them unattractive) and young people (who don't yet have much experience, and whom employers might not want to take on the burden of training). Recent college grads are currently facing an unemployment level that outpaces the national average : 5.8 percent vs. 4.2 percent. Last summer, Inside Higher Ed highlighted a report finding that “more than half of bachelor's degree holders are underemployed a year after graduation.”

The widespread economic uncertainty , mass government layoffs , and weakened growth all caused recently by the Trump administration don't help the picture. Indeed, it's only going to spur a more urgent crisis down the line. But the trouble felt today has been brewing for longer than that—since 2022, to be exact. That was the year COVID-era interest rates finally went up and kicked off the massive rounds of rolling tech layoffs that have persisted up through this year. (A few prominent examples from 2025 alone : ​​a 5 percent workforce cut at Meta, 1,000 jobs lost at Salesforce, a 10 percent workforce reduction at Blue Origin, and 2,000 jobs focused at HP.) “I know so many people who have been laid off from tech companies in the last year,” said Anna J. Rogers, a Bay Area–based science communicator who wrote for Slate about recently leaving her job with the National Institutes of Health.

The first tech layoffs were the crash after a period of rapid pandemic-era hiring, remote-working flexibility, and low interest rates to rejuvenate the COVID-crashed economy. All of that spurred white-collar sectors to greatly expand—and, more importantly, this offered great flexibility to workers, who were able to switch jobs easily and negotiate better salaries. Then, interest rates went up, along with interest in revitalizing office attendance. White-collar executives pressed the brakes—not just on carefree spending, but on normal avenues of growth, like routine hiring and training for new roles. They also cut plenty of middle-management and human resources jobs, outsourcing many candidate-screening and hiring processes to automated software.

Across industries, the number of private sector jobs added last month was the lowest we've seen in a year. Overall hiring rates are at their lowest level since the pre-COVID era . Daniel Zhao, lead economist at the employer-reviews site Glassdoor, shared a company study from November that noted how “almost 2 in 3 professionals feel stuck in their careers” thanks to job-market jitters. “Additionally, in Glassdoor reviews in January, mentions of layoffs, inflation and recession were all up as economic anxiety is on the rise,” Zhao wrote in an email.

“Employees are less confident in their ability to leave their jobs and find new ones, as evidenced by a low quit rate,” said Allison Shrivastava, an economist with the job board Indeed, in an email. “Job postings in knowledge-based fields like IT, software, and banking are below pre-pandemic levels, declining after reaching a peak in 2022.”

The job postings that are available can be frustrating, to say the least. “It's like, We're looking for someone who's trained in marketing and can do sales and bookkeeping and basic accounting on Excel ,” the Substack writer who goes by Femcel vented to me in a video conversation. “OK, you actually should be hiring an accountant, a salesperson, and a marketer. But you want someone who's going to be a catchall for the random stuff in the office that needs to get done, and to pay one bad salary.”

And sometimes, the jobs that have been listed don't really exist at all. A Resume Builder study from last summer found that 3 out of 10 online postings are “ghosts ,” meaning that the roles don't exist or employers don't actually plan to fill said roles. There are a few reasons companies go for such misleading postings, which have the added effect of making j ob-reports numbers seem rosier than they actually are. Maybe they're planning to hire for that position much further into the future, or they want shareholders to think they're growing at a healthy pace. “The game is that these companies can say to investors, 'I know we have no profits yet, but we're trying to grow. We're trying to hire so badly,' ” said Dave. “I fully believe that LinkedIn is mostly ghost listings.” Zia shares that feeling: “Going through the job-applying process, I realized more and more that these companies, they're not really looking to hire,” he told me. “These job boards are almost like a playground for them.”

All of this has fueled a legitimate crisis of trust. Earlier this year, the background-check platform Checkr surveyed 3,000 active job-seekers from all age groups about the market and chronicled the results in a February research report . About two-thirds of respondents reported that they have fallen for ghost jobs; a similar percent of respondents believed that companies overall “are not being honest about true hiring intentions.” In addition, nearly 60 percent of those surveyed stated that “securing an interview or even a response through traditional job boards feels nearly impossible,” especially if they don't already have a personal connection at a particular company. “The state of hiring in the US is at a critical turning point—job-seekers are facing a lack of transparency, inconsistent communication, and hiring processes that feel increasingly disconnected from their needs,” Sam Radbil, a research strategist with Checkr, wrote in an email.

The growing automation of HR means that fewer humans are involved in the hiring process, with AI taking on tasks like writing and sharing job descriptions , screening summaries, putting job-seekers on “ block lists ,” and even conducting interviews —all of which can make the process of actually connecting with an employer incredibly vexing. And if you're still lucky enough to get through the interviews and finally land an offer, you might not be out of the woods yet. “I got laid off early last year and was applying for at least 100 jobs a week,” said Jessica B. Davis, a career coach who currently works at S&P Global. “But I was ending up in situations, like many others I knew, where I would get an offer and then they would retract it because I wanted to negotiate my salary.” The unfortunate fact remains: Budgets are tight.