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\n Illustration: Johanna Walderdorff\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Back in the fall of 2024 I began to sense from a variety of people \u2014 from my closest loved ones to strangers I encountered \u2014 that something seemed \u2026 wrong. Despite the universal proclamations of a roaring economy \u2014 minus ole gal inflation \u2014 almost everyone\u2019s job searches were proving notably hellish, dragging out to four or eight or 14 months. Particularly if they weren\u2019t tapping a cast-iron network and sometimes even if they were. \u201cHumiliation ritual,\u201d a friend texted me, attaching a screenshot of a demeaning email from an HR rep addressing her by another candidate\u2019s name. Another sent a voice note featuring elements increasingly familiar to me: hiring processes that lasted four or five months with five-plus rounds of Zoom interviews by committee and spaced multiple weeks apart, chaotic instructions, uncompensated skills tests that would take a whole day\u2019s work to complete.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n AI tools appear to be on the rise on both sides of the job search, creating uncanny automations like getting a rejection email message 40 seconds after submitting a labor-intensive application. It has grown easier than ever for a person to apply, in a desultory, semi-automated way, to a job, whether by having Claude write their cover letters or hitting EasyApply on LinkedIn, which means that within 24 hours any job posting online might already have 100 applicants. LinkedIn reports applications went up 45 percent annually, averaging 11,000 a minute. Employers, overwhelmed, returned fire with their own automations. The result: a maelstrom of AI-powered r\u00e9sum\u00e9 screening, chatbots for early interviews, gamified skills tests, and unconventional-to-jarring behavioral interview modes that are trying to control for the likelihood that a candidate is typing prompts into Claude or ChatGPT to cheat through the interview.<\/p>\n I should say that I had some personal skin in the game. My partner was on the job search, and for a period, motivated in part by a health scare that made me feel worried about staying self-employed, so was I. When I wasn\u2019t grinding through my own work or proofing cover letters of loved ones, I tried to understand what was going on.\u00a0I read papers from think tanks and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and newsletters like Laid Off<\/a>. Trawled through sub-Reddits and TikTok and online fora of people discussing their job searches. People shared online about getting ghosted repeatedly by recruiters, about being six months away from losing their houses, about partners leaving them because of the strain and downturn in their mental health, about struggles applying to unemployment benefits, about exchanging a life with a mortgage for one crashing with elderly parents while gazing into LinkedIn\u2019s abyss. All the while, macroeconomic data continued to proclaim a strong economy with low unemployment.<\/p>\n Fast-forward a year, and roughly 7.4 million Americans are now unemployed. The unemployment rate inched up to 4.3 percent as of August 2025; still on the low side, but up from 3.4 percent in 2023. The picture looks worse for some groups: Black workers face a 7.5 percent jobless rate; youth unemployment is closer to 10.5 percent. New York City added fewer than 1,000<\/a> new jobs in the first two quarters of this year; the city added over 66,000 during the same period in 2024. Nationally, hiring has grown more lethargic: The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings has been rising, meaning fewer opportunities per job seeker. As of August 2025, approximately 1.9 million Americans have been looking for work for six months or more, the highest share of long-term unemployment since the pandemic years. And six months is typically the longest you can collect unemployment benefits in most states, including New York.<\/p>\n Unemployment numbers, of course, only paint part of the picture when it comes to workers. Even the employed, for a variety of reasons, may want or urgently need to acquire different jobs. People who are dog-walking and delivering Thai food in the rain while looking for full-time work technically count as employed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but that does not mean they are happy and thriving or think of themselves as not on the search.<\/p>\n Ian Shapiro, professor of political science at Yale and author of the book The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It, believes that there is a far more important factor at play than the unemployment rate. \u201cWhat is high, and has remained high for a long time,\u201d he says to me, \u201cis job insecurity.\u201d A young person today, he notes, will change jobs between 12 and 15 times in their life. Shapiro defines job insecurity as a lack of knowing you can stay and flourish in your existing place of employment. There is little stability to be had in the America of the past decade-plus. Have a job and all is good, until you lose it, and with it health care and other kinds of security.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at this slide here,\u201d he told me over Zoom. \u201cThis is wages since the 1970s. The people in the top one percent have just made out like there\u2019s no tomorrow. But if you look at the bottom 90 percent, which is really what we\u2019re talking about, wages have pretty much been stagnant for decades. You can see it\u2019s going down for every age group here. It used to be mostly middle-aged workers that were job-insecure. But everybody\u2019s job-insecure now.\u201d<\/p>\n Many\u00a0of the people I spoke to about their job searches are office workers and would be considered part of or on track for the PMC, or professional-managerial class. Their jobs have historically been often better-paid and relatively shielded from poor working conditions. But now, the promise of upward mobility and identity through a job is starting, slowly, to dissolve, leaving a generation of laptop workers confronting a new, hostile economic and cultural landscape.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve long been sold the idea of work as identity, purpose, and social mobility. So what happens if the machine breaks down? When people are doing everything \u201cright\u201d \u2014 networking, optimizing, trawling LinkedIn \u2014 and still hearing nothing back? What does it feel like to search for employment now, to swim against the current in the sea of American insecurity?<\/p>\n Take David. David, 35, wakes up before eight every weekday morning in Brooklyn and, over a cup of coffee and some Vyvanse, starts applying for jobs. Five at a minimum. Sometimes more, because volume feels like the only weapon left. Before being laid off along with 10 percent of their department, they were working for a major New York cultural institution. They have years of experience in tech and project management. In the past two months, they have sent in 200 applications and been asked back for zero interviews.<\/p>\n \u201cI will certainly not get a job I don\u2019t apply to,\u201d David notes wryly. \u201cI will almost certainly not get a job I do apply to. And that \u2018almost\u2019 is why I keep applying. It\u2019s like going to services for a religion I don\u2019t believe in. It\u2019s a ritual.\u201d<\/p>\n Miles away from David, Alexandra is wading through her own tall pile of applications but from the other side of the desk. She is hiring for two open midlevel roles at a national nonprofit organization. Since the postings went up on the applicant tracking service her company uses to manage its recruitment, each one has garnered applications in the high hundreds. Forty percent of these are incomplete: missing either the cover letters, the requested writing samples, or the extra deliverable that the posting specifically asked for.<\/p>\n Alexandra has felt jarred by the collapse of formalities that she was taught were essential. Few, if any, candidates send thank-you notes after interviews. She\u2019s been startled by the sheer number of applicants who cold-emailed her to ask to talk about the role after applying, which she simply doesn\u2019t have the capacity to take on, given that she is managing the hiring processes in addition to her own labor-intensive role. Unlike many other application-tracking systems on the market, the one Alexandra\u2019s organization uses has not integrated AI functions yet, but she suspects AI-enabled spray-and-pray and EasyApply style tools are behind the masses of generic and incomplete applications that arrive in her stack. \u201cPeople are just applying to everything and throwing everything against the wall,\u201d Alexandra says. \u201cThat means you have to do a lot more sorting.\u201d<\/p>\n Alexandra is sympathetic to the pains of the job hunt; she had her own nightmarish 14-month-long search before getting to her current role. She also sees a lack of mentorship and networking and a resulting erosion of codified norms and mutually understood standards of etiquette contributing to the larger problem. \u201cGen Z is way less formal about everything,\u201d Alexandra says, seeming at once unsettled and sympathetic. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018The world is burning, so what do I want with your nice approach?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The trouble is, of course, that in addition to meeting candidate qualification requirements, most hiring processes reward those who appear collegial, able to work well with others, and seem assured in their own abilities. In other words, most job searches reward people who seem confident and nice, both qualities that the new American job-search process erodes the longer it has you in its grasp.<\/p>\n Paul, a 37-year-old New York tech worker who quit his job a year ago to pivot to events production, an industry he worked in before the pandemic, is still looking for a job.\u00a0He supports himself with freelance gigs along the way. He says that the hardest thing about the process is how much it saps your confidence, how much work comes up socially, with friends or when dating.<\/p>\n Long-term job-searching can also magnify existing senses of vulnerability, from race \u2014 Paul is Black seeking work in a largely white field \u2014 to disability to gender. From multiple people I spoke with, it grew apparent how long-term unemployment can conflict with social scripts around masculinity in particular, where even the ostensibly feminist may expect, consciously or not, competence, success, and the ability \u2014 to use a word that is tossed around with alacrity in the womanosphere<\/a> \u2014 to be a provider. It might be galling, to say the least, to struggle with the hostilities and sense of powerlessness of the job search and then go online and hear TikTok discourse around \u201cbroke boys\u201d and \u201cprincess treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n Job insecurity and unemployment can eat self-esteem, produce the drowning buzz of crippling anxiety, shorten the range of a person\u2019s hope and belief in the system, in their future, in themselves. It can produce zero-sum, suspicious thinking, slowly and insidiously making people see other people as their competition, and wondering if their identities are a small part of the reason they are getting passed over. The mental-health impact of long unemployment is well-observed in research; people on the job search for a long time struggle with anxiety, depression, feelings of failure, and (both real and perceived) social stigma.<\/p>\n David described their first encounter with an AI-tool recruiter, a voice-enabled pattern-recognition software agent contacting them, talking to them, and screening them before deciding whether to pass candidates along to humans adjudicating their hiring process, as a demoralizing, gallows-humor episode. They trailed off, and added, \u201cThe whole thing feels \u2026 disrespectful. Give me a job fair. Give me something where I can interact with another human.\u201d<\/p>\n When Anurima, 27, was let go from a Queens nonprofit this spring, she noted that her HR department timed the termination just days before her health insurance would renew despite knowing she had a surgery scheduled.\u00a0Compared to many other people I spoke to, Anurima is emotionally steady about her job search thus far. \u201cHonestly, I haven\u2019t spent a lot of time being upset,\u201d she says. \u201cThe worst part was the insurance. But unemployment benefits and gig work have given me the ability to stay here and keep doing the things I want.\u201d<\/p>\n For much of Gen Z, the idea of a meritocratic labor market is something akin to a fairy tale. \u201cI literally think you can only get a job by talking to somebody in New York,\u201d Anurima added. \u201cThey need to know you before you send your app in \u2026 Otherwise, it\u2019s all LinkedIn Easy Apply, piles of a hundred r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, and no one cares.\u201d<\/p>\n Anurima does not use AI at all and rarely applies to postings she has no network connection to. She believes generally that people should only apply to jobs that they want so as to not contribute to r\u00e9sum\u00e9 overwhelm.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the time I got laid off, two of my roommates got laid off,\u201d she notes. \u201cIt feels like everyone\u2019s scrambling.\u201d She admits that rising youth unemployment frightens her a little, but she believes her generation won\u2019t simply retreat in isolation. Instead, she said, the people she knows are applying for jobs together with other unemployed friends, sharing resources, and helping each other out financially and otherwise.<\/p>\n Generally, the people I spoke to about their job searches suggested trying to not job search alone. They recommended trying to remember that the bad news and rejections are typically structural, not personal. Trying to internalize that all you need is one single yes. Trying to do things that make you feel good about yourself that are unconnected to the job search. Trying to remember to lean on people who care about you and ask for help.\u00a0 Paul has found a sense of esteem and meaning in working out hard; David has started a photography side project with a friend; Anurima has a burgeoning side hustle as a DJ.<\/p>\n Getting shredded, networking well, pursuing side projects, playing the long game, not taking it personally, keeping it positive, asking for help \u2014 these are all good orientations. But they are also individual approaches to enormous structural problems.<\/p>\n COVID-19\u2019s paradigm shift and strengthened economic safety net gave a stupendous mass of (surviving, non-disabled, non-blue-collar) workers sudden sway in the workplace of a kind not seen in decades. It produced the Great Resignation, with its signing bonuses, counteroffers, and leverage around working remotely. And, alongside the explosion of moral reckoning around race and gender, alongside the proliferation of platforms like Slack and Twitter that allowed mass speech and critique, the pandemic years created a powerful, unsteady, fermenting cultural brew: worker power, often-unfocused internal \u201cactivism,\u201d and ambivalent hostility toward bosses and owners.<\/p>\n But it was short-lived. The mid-2020s, with their backdrop of economic and political volatility, have been about reasserting the bosses\u2019 power.<\/p>\n That reassertion, with its lack of soft landing place, has been meted out unevenly in ways that are familiar to those of us who came of age during the Great Recession or its long recovery. The unemployment rate for people ages 22\u201327 is 7.4 percent.\u00a0Black women are among the fastest-rising groups among the unemployed. A July 2025 survey by a financial platform found that 41 percent of Gen Z runs out of money nearly every month, and only 22 percent consider themselves financially stable. AI, while not yet a significant driver of job loss, is beginning to displace entry-level positions, especially in law,\u00a0finance, and tech. Insecurity and precarity have started to come for office jobs, tech workers, the formerly protected, the\u00a0professional managerial class. The sinkhole into the American underclass has now expanded.<\/p>\n What sets this downturn apart from the panics and busts of the past is that now every layer of labor, from hiring to firing, is increasingly mediated by automations and algorithms that cannot hold the irreducible realities of human life. The person-based relational constellation that once transmitted skill, mentorship, and mutual obligation, however imperfect, has now been replaced by a digital loop: workers feeding prompts into the same systems that eventually gatekeep, surveil, and smoothly replace them. When David talks about the job search as a ritual without belief, or Alexandra describes the erosion of even small gestures of connection, they\u2019re naming something deeper than frustration. It is the feeling that the relation between worker and employer \u2014 never benevolent but ideally cooperative \u2014 may without a course correction be whittled down to the point of rupture.<\/p>\n