There is no better window into the soul of America’s striving professional class than LinkedIn, a site that this year often seemed less like a networking platform than an extended group therapy session.
To doomscroll through it was to encounter one post after another about the barren landscape for job hunters — laments about resumes silently filtered out by AI-powered gatekeepers and employers ghosting candidates midway through their interview process. Users with little green “#OpenToWork” banners on their avatars — the cheery mark of the damned — commiserated about sending dozens if not hundreds of applications out into the ether without luck.
“After nearly eight months of unemployment and a nonstop corporate job search in this brutal job market, I’ve pivoted,” began one such note. “I’ve made a decision to take a full-time role at Trader Joe’s.”
The LinkedInners were not entirely imagining things: 2025 was by many measures the worst year to be looking for a job since Barack Obama was still in the Oval Office. Amid an atmosphere of economic uncertainty, hiring ground to its slowest pace in over a decade, excluding the first months of the pandemic. It was a tough time to find new employment whether you were a manufacturing worker, a 20-something just out of college, or one of the many “innovative project managers” or “skilled PR pros” who have frayed their nerves fruitlessly updating online resumes and refreshing their “top job picks for you” tab.
“If you need a new job right now — whether you’re a recent grad or have been unlucky enough to suffer a layoff — the market is bad,” Guy Berger, a workforce economist at Guild, told me. “Arguably not just bad, but terrible.”
US employment growth has been weak at best for most of this year — and possibly nonexistent, if you believe the Federal Reserve. Even if you set aside the federal workforce, which now has a smoking, DOGE-shaped crater in it, the US has added just 50,000 new jobs per month since May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That would be its worst stretch since 2010, aside from the early days of Covid-19. (With the federal cuts, we’re adding a paltry 17,000 a month.)
But the reality may be even grimmer than those official figures let on. Fed chair Jerome Powell has said that the government may actually be overstating its tally of new jobs by about 60,000 per month, because the BLS has had trouble accurately accounting for the impact of business startups and closures. We won’t know for sure until the agency releases revised data down the line, but for now, the upshot is that employers’ payrolls are either barely growing or outright shrinking.
Meanwhile, unemployment is rising — meaning an increasing number of people want work but can’t find it. The jobless rate hit 4.6 percent in November, up 0.6 percentage points since January.
That number is still reasonably low by historical standards, at least for now. But there’s another reason why life has seemed so tough on job seekers: For over two years, the US has been stuck in what economists describe as a “low-churn” rut, where employers are neither firing nor hiring very many workers.
This point has often been a matter of confusion, thanks in part to highly publicized mass job cuts at tech giants, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel, as well as other major companies like UPS. But despite occasional news stories suggesting otherwise, layoffs are up just slightly from 2024 nationwide, and are still below the levels of 2019, when the labor market was widely seen as in great shape, according to the federal Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey.
The problem, rather, is that companies just aren’t making a lot of job offers these days. This year, the nationwide hiring rate — which essentially measures how fast employers are growing headcount — eased to its slowest speed since the post-Great Recession malaise of 2013, based on a six-month rolling average.
The unemployment rate has risen faster among young college graduates than it has for young workers without a bachelor’s degree.
That’s created a two-tier economy of sorts. If you have a job, things aren’t so bad. Some people might feel a bit stuck — which is why the phrase “job hugging” took off this year — but the median American who stayed put at their workplace saw their wages grow by 3.8 percent this year, solidly above the rate of inflation, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
But if you don’t have a job? Then there’s a decent chance you’ll be locked out in the cold for a bit. Imagine a nightclub where the bouncer is only letting in VIPs, not many people are leaving the building, and the line outside is gradually getting longer as more partiers get stuck outside the velvet rope. Then you’ll get the picture.
“The labor market always feels different for those who have a job versus those who don’t,” said economist Jed Kolko, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But the gap is much bigger than usual.”
The vast majority of the hiring rate’s decline took place between 2022 and mid-2024. This year, it slipped just slightly more, with the six-month average dropping to 3.3 percent in October from 3.4 percent in January. But as the period of sluggish hiring has stretched on, more and more people are starting to feel its pinch, “The effect of it is cumulative,” Kolko said.
The environment has been more unusually rough for some groups than others, which may help explain the mood among professionals on LinkedIn in particular. The unemployment rate has risen faster among young college graduates, for instance, than it has for young workers without a bachelor’s degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and for the former now looks similar to 2013. As of the third quarter of this year, the unemployment rate for Americans with an advanced degree averaged its highest in at least a decade (once again, excluding the early pandemic months). Several sectors heavy on white-collar workers — information (which covers the big tech companies announcing layoffs), financial activities, and professional and business services — have all lost jobs over the past six months.
But the increasingly tough hiring environment has hit blue-collar workers too. The manufacturing industry has been shedding jobs outright, and unemployment is jumping faster in the sector than in the economy as a whole. The unemployment rate among Black Americans, who are less likely than average to have a college degree, has shot up rapidly.
Some indicators do paint a slightly less dire picture for job hunters than the raw hiring rate. For instance, the share of unemployed workers who find jobs each month is about on par with late 2016. A handful of specific industries are still in perfectly fine shape, too. Health care and private education have added 345,000 jobs over the past half year, essentially making them responsible for all net job growth in the economy. As usual, it’s not a bad time to be in medicine.
Still, the consensus among economists seems to be that the job market is relatively fallow, especially compared to the giddy post-COVID hiring boom. It’s a somewhat odd situation, given that economic growth has been pretty healthy. (Gross domestic product just clocked its best quarter since late 2023.) But there are several potential causes for the dip, at least some of which can be traced back to our current president.
Almost every expert who spoke with Vox said that Trump’s immigration crackdown has weighed on overall job growth, since some industries that traditionally rely heavily on nonnative workers are seemingly struggling to hire. Take construction. The sector has barely added employees this year, and the unemployment rate among America’s hardhats is near rock bottom. That suggests contractors may be straining to find hands amid the White House’s deportation push.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s analytics, told me that “even if the economy was humming along, we’d only be creating 50,000 to 75,000 jobs a month” thanks to the lack of immigrant workers. There simply would not be enough new labor supply to add more.
Employers are predicting an even worse hiring environment for next year’s class of college grads.
Of course, we’re likely creating far fewer jobs than that right now according to the Fed, and unemployment for native-born workers has been rising, which suggests immigration can’t be the whole story.
Many economists believe Trump’s tariffs are also partly at fault. Proving it is difficult though, in part because growth has held up so far despite Trump’s assault on the global trade system as we know it. But they note that tariff-exposed industries like manufacturing and wholesaling have struggled, while overall job creation dove almost immediately after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. The stop and start early rollout of the tariffs may have also delayed some of their impact until later in the year.
“We’ll need more careful research to untangle it all, but it seems very likely that a nontrivial portion of the slowdown is due to tariffs,” said Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Economic Innovation Group, a Washington, DC think tank. He also suggested that the Fed’s caution about cutting interest rates has weighed on hiring.
The more general sense of upheaval under Trump has also made some executives gun-shy about hiring. Back in May, about 40 percent of companies surveyed by the Atlanta Fed said that they were scaling back their hiring plans due to uncertainty around government policy. Tariffs were by far the most frequently cited factor, but federal spending, monetary policy, and regulations also came up. (Which isn’t shocking — just consider all the renewables businesses that have had to rip up their plans this year as the administration has gone to war on the industry.)
Others are a bit less apt to blame Trump’s policies. Kolko, a former Biden official, played down the impact of tariffs, noting that most of the decline in the hiring rate took place well before the administration’s trade war. Instead, he argues that companies are more likely just tightening their belts after overhiring as the economy reopened from Covid. At the time, workers were scarce and companies were desperate to pin down as many as possible.
“You actually need a period of below-normal hiring if you’re compensating for a period of overhiring,” he said.
Finally, there’s the role of the machines, which is still being hotly debated. Companies have cited artificial intelligence as a factor in about 55,000 layoffs this year, according to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s a relatively small number in the scheme of the economy, and it’s unclear how many of those firms are simply gesturing at the technology as a way to justify actions they would have taken anyway. Economists, for their part, have yet to find any evidence that AI has had a broad impact on the job market yet, despite many of the more dire predictions about the imminent extinction of white collar labor.
Still, a recent draft paper by Stanford University economists suggests that the rise of large language models has crimped entry-level hiring in certain fields, such as computer coding and marketing. Chatbots aren’t taking over the economy yet, but there’s a chance they’ve begun narrowing the base of the corporate funnel.
And what about next year? It’s not clear the economy or job market are getting rapidly worse, but there are some caution signs. The rising Black unemployment rate may be a leading indicator of deterioration in the labor market. Employers are predicting an even worse hiring environment for next year’s class of college grads. The share of companies saying they plan to hire in the coming months has barely budged, according to a recent ManpowerGroup survey of 6,000 businesses.
In short, if you’ve got a job, keep hugging it. And if not, keep praying to the LinkedIn gods that something pops up.
