Harris started looking for his first real job months before his graduation from UC Davis this spring. He had a solid résumé, he thought: a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of recommendation. He would move anywhere on the West Coast, living out of his car if he had to. He would accept a temporary, part-time, or seasonal gig, not just a full-time position. He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands.
He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded.
Right now, millions of would-be workers find themselves in a similar position. Corporate profits are strong, the jobless rate is 4.3 percent, and wages are climbing in turn. But payrolls have been essentially frozen for the past four months. The hiring rate has declined to its lowest point since the jobless recovery following the Great Recession. Four years ago, employers were adding four or five workers for every 100 they had on the books, month in and month out. Now they are adding three.
At the same time, the process of getting a job has become a late-capitalist nightmare. Online hiring platforms have made it easier to find an opening but harder to secure one: Applicants send out thousands of AI-crafted résumés, and businesses use AI to sift through them. What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.
Every time Harris logged in to LinkedIn or Indeed, he would see scores of gigs that seemed like they might be a good fit. He would read a posting carefully, scrub his résumé, tailor an introductory note, answer the company’s screening questions, hit “Send,” hope for the best, and hear nothing in response—again and again and again.
Other job seekers described similar experiences. In suburban Virginia, a paralegal named Martine got laid off by a government contractor in April. (Like Harris, she did not want to dim her employment prospects by providing her full name.) She saw plenty of jobs being advertised at nonprofits, law firms, consultancies, and universities. She sent out dozens of applications. She even got to the second round a few times. But she never came close to being hired. “I have 10 years of experience,” she told me. “I would be happy if a person told me no at this point.”
For employers, the job market is working differently too. Businesses receive countless ill-fitting applications, along with a few good ones, for each open position. Rather than poring over the submissions by hand, they use machines. In a recent survey, chief HR officers told the Boston Consulting Group that they are using AI to write job descriptions, assess candidates, schedule introductory meetings, and evaluate applications. In some cases, firms are using chatbots to interview candidates, too. Prospective hires log in to a Zoom-like system and field questions from an avatar. Their performance is taped, and an algorithm searches for keywords and evaluates their tone.
Priya Rathod, a career-trends expert at Indeed, told me she understands why job seekers feel as if their résumés are “going into a void.” But she argued that the online platforms make it easier for people to find open positions and that AI can “get them to the next stage of the interview quicker,” if their applications fit an employer’s needs.
Still, a lot of job applicants never end up in a human-to-human process. The impossibility of getting to the interview stage spurs jobless workers to submit more applications, which pushes them to rely on ChatGPT to build their résumés and respond to screening prompts. (Harris told me he does this; he used ChatGPT pretty much every day in college, and finds its writing to be more “professional” than his own.) And so the cycle continues: The surge in same-same AI-authored applications prompts employers to use robot filters to manage the flow. Everyone ends up in Tinderized job-search hell.
For months, the economy has been in a low-hire, low-fire equilibrium; virtually every sector of the labor market except for health care has been frozen. The amount of time a worker has spent looking for a job has climbed to an average of 10 weeks, meaning that Americans are spending two weeks longer on the job market than they were a few years ago. The share of American workers quitting a job has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, because of concerns about rising prices and jitters about slowing growth.
The equilibrium now seems to be falling apart, and a full-on recession looks likely. Black workers have experienced a dramatic surge in joblessness, in part because of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees. (The 154,000 civil servants who took the White House’s “Fork in the Road” deferred-resignation offer will receive their last paycheck this month.) More than 10 percent of workers under the age of 24 are searching for a job. “Performance-based and strategic layoffs are increasing,” Lydia Boussour of the consultancy EY-Parthenon wrote in a note to clients last week. “Cracks are increasingly showing.”
What is a worker supposed to do? Martine and Harris and millions like them are still trying to figure that out; she keeps on applying, whereas he is doing landscaping and volunteering. Rathod said that she recommends old-fashioned networking: asking recruiters out for coffee, going to in-person job events, and surveying friends and former employers for leads.
Such strategies might work if employers begin hiring again. But if not, millions more people might be left pitching their CVs into the void.
