Washington– When Carly Kapriv left her job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she thought it would take three to six months to find a new job. After all, the 32-year-old project manager had never been out of work for more than three months.
Instead, 700 applications later, she is still searching, immersed in a frustrating and lengthy job search process that is far more difficult than when she last looked for work just two years ago. With the end of uncertainty Interest rates, Definitions, ImmigrationWith artificial intelligence disrupting the economy, some of the companies I interviewed with suddenly decided not to fill the position at all.
“The roles were definitely canceled mid-interview entirely, and they wouldn’t even move forward with hiring anyone,” she said.
Capriv is caught in a historical anomaly: the unemployment rate is low and the economy is low Still growingBut the unemployed are facing the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Sunk, chief economist at KPMG, describes this phenomenon as an “unemployment boom.”
while Layoff announcements in major companies These jobs typically get the most attention, but it’s the reluctance of many companies to add workers that has created a job market that’s more painful than the low unemployment rate of 4.3% might suggest. It is also more complex: a “low-employment, low-employment” economy means fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.
“It’s like an inside-out thing, with outsiders who need jobs struggling to get their footing, even as insiders are cut off from what has so far been a low-layoff environment,” said Jay Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute.
Several major companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including… UPS, goaland IBM, although Berger said it was too early to tell whether these indicators signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But ramping up job cuts will be especially difficult with employment rates already low.
Right now, it’s more difficult than ever to get a clear read on the labor market because the government shutdown has cut off monthly employment reports from the US Department of Labor. The October jobs report was scheduled to be released on Friday but, like the jobs report, was postponed September numbers before that. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all data may be collected.
Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the employment rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of workers — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest number outside of the pandemic since March 2013.
At the time, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, with the economy slowly recovering from the job losses of the Great Recession of 2008-2009. This is much higher than August’s 4.3%.
Many unemployed people question the current low rate. Brad Meslow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing his job as an advertising executive in New York City. He now substitute teaches to make ends meet.
“It’s frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, and the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who fight every day and hold on to pieces of debris in shark-infested waters, or who have no idea what that looks like.”
With the government shutdown, financial markets are paying more attention to private sector data, but this is also mixed. Thursday, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Anxious investors With a report announcing that job cuts rose by 175% in October compared to last year.
However, payroll processor ADP said Wednesday that net hiring rose in October as companies added 42,000 jobs, after two months of decline. However, the gains were modest. ADP’s numbers are based on anonymized data from 26 million workers at client companies.
Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics firm, estimated Thursday that the economy lost 9,000 jobs in October. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Estimates The unemployment rate rose to 4.4% last month.
Even when the government was publishing data from economists and officials at the Federal Reserve We weren’t sure How healthy the labor market is or where it is headed next. sharp decline in Immigration and intensification of deportations It has helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by limiting the supply of workers. The economy does not need to create many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, called for a “strange equilibrium” because supply and demand for workers have declined.
Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: increasing uncertainty about tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power artificial intelligence is booming, high interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.
“The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has made the economy look better on paper than most Americans feel,” Swonk said.
Younger Americans have I bore the brunt Employment is slowing, but many older workers are also suffering.
Susan Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago, the Chicago resident found work quickly — three months after leaving the job, she received three offers. She has now been unemployed since April.
She worries that her age is a challenge, but she doesn’t let that hold her back. “I got a job when I was 63, so I don’t see a reason not to get a job at 65,” she said.
Like many job seekers, she was flabbergasted by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by recruitment programs. She received one email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, even though she had not done an interview. Another company that had never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about her engagement.
Weak employment means unemployment spells are becoming longer, according to government data. More than a quarter of the unemployed had been out of work for more than six months or more, a figure that rose sharply in July and August, compared to about 21% a year ago.
Such increases are unusual outside of recessions, Swonk said.
An increasing number of unemployed people have also given up looking for work, According to research By the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This also leads to a lower unemployment rate because people who stop looking are not considered unemployed.
But Capriv is still sticking with it, taking classes on Amazon Web Services to enhance her technology skills.
“We cannot be so narrow-minded in what we are willing to accept,” she said.