Since being laid off from her human resources job in the hospitality industry in May, Sashi Cayard has tried it all: walking into businesses to hand over her resume in person, applying to a slew of positions online, venturing outside of her industry, and contacting hiring managers directly.
Still, nothing. The 26-year-old from Miami even tried appealing to politicians for help.
“The job market is so bad that when I went to Washington, D.C., I dropped off copies of my resume to my state representatives and was like, ‘Hey, can you help me find a job? There are no jobs in your district, and half the postings you see are ghost postings,’” Cayard said in a video posted to TikTok in August.
She never heard back.
Now, some would say — finally — that economic data is catching up to what job seekers like Cayard have known for months about the state of the US job market. The unemployment rate, which had been hovering between 4% and 4.2% since May 2024, broke out of that narrow range in August to hit 4.3%, the highest level since October 2021. Revisions to jobs data showed the country actually shed 13,000 positions in June, the first monthly net job loss since December 2020 while adding nearly a million fewer jobs than initially reported for the year prior through March 2025.
“If you are currently employed and you’re happy with your employment, you’re probably feeling OK because that layoff rate is still pretty low,” said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “But if you’re trying to get into the labor market or switch jobs, you’re going to be having a really difficult time.”
Cayard, who has a bachelor’s degree in hospitality and tourism management and a master’s degree in human resources management, started applying for other roles immediately after losing her last position. She was especially concerned about healthcare: Staying on her employer’s plan through COBRA costs around $800 a month. So far, she’s put in over 500 applications, but she’s only reached the interview stage for two jobs.
So it goes in a no-hire, no-fire job market: The employed are staying at jobs they might otherwise leave rather than face a brutal market, and the unemployed are finding they’re unable to get a foot in the door as companies keep from hiring due to economic uncertainty.
“Applying for jobs is a full-time job,” Cayard said. “People ask, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m trying to just keep on keeping on.’”
There’s reason to be concerned. The share of out-of-work Americans who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks reached 25.7% in August, a level last seen in early 2022 before job openings reached a record high amid a red-hot labor market.
“Jobs aren’t being shed, necessarily — layoff rates are still pretty low — but we aren’t adding a lot of jobs to the economy, and people also aren’t quitting their jobs,” Shrivastava said.
Workers are coming off from the highs of an extremely strong post-pandemic job market, making this fall particularly dizzying, Shrivastava noted.
Meanwhile, unemployment is nowhere near where it was during the pandemic, inflation is far below where it was in 2022, and consumer spending remains strong, though that’s being driven by high-income consumers, leaving questions on how long these bad feelings may last.
Read more: Jobs, inflation, and the Fed: How they’re all related
Sentiment about finding a job, meanwhile, is already plummeting. The New York Fed’s measure of workers’ perceived probability of landing a job after losing their current position is at its lowest level, according to survey data going back to June 2013. The University of Michigan’s survey of consumers, meanwhile, shows the share of respondents expecting higher unemployment in the next 12 months is at its highest since the Great Recession.
For those stuck searching for work, the current reality is a roller coaster of applications that seems to lead people off a cliff. Some postings are “ghost jobs” that never appear to get filled at all. And some applications are reviewed by AI, meaning an hour of tailoring a resume and cover letter may result in a rejection in minutes.
Felicia Enriquez, a 47-year-old in Los Angeles, has been unemployed for about 14 months after unexpectedly losing her job as a paralegal and is consistently looking for work. She’s picked up freelance work as a journalist to keep herself busy, but she’s still six months behind on rent.
While initially looking for work as a paralegal, she’s struggled to find a position because she doesn’t speak Spanish, which she finds is often a requirement in her area. So she broadened her search and recently applied for a position at CVS.
“I’m willing to take anything at this point,” Enriquez said.
Tyler Tiede, a 27-year-old in Rochester, N.Y., is also deep in the job hunt after stepping away from his software engineering position in late November for a personal hiatus. Tiede, who has a physics degree, was casually looking for work right away, but ramped up his search in June.
In the beginning, he was only applying for software engineering positions — competing with both computer science graduates who can’t find work and recently laid-off tech workers. After applying to hundreds of software engineering roles, he’s started to look for roles as a sales engineer or product engineer and is pivoting to IT and system administrator work. He’s also delivering orders through Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Tiede is lucky to have a support system behind him, including his girlfriend, he said. But being unemployed can challenge “your opinion of yourself on a day-to-day basis.”
“I’ve tracked, like, my last 100 applications, and as of a couple weeks ago, I think 60% of them just never even replied to me, ever, and then 40% rejected me,” Tiede said. “You either don’t hear back anything, or they just say, ‘Oh, we went with someone else.’ You don’t really get real feedback on the reason why.”
Shrivastava said she can understand workers’ frustration with a frozen job market. She recommended that people out of work use this time to upskill and leverage their network where possible.
“You’re probably not going to be as penalized as you would be in a thriving labor market for having gaps in your resume,” Shrivastava said. “People are pretty understanding, given that we’re kind of all experiencing the economy together.”
Emma Ockerman is a reporter covering the economy and labor for Yahoo Finance. You can reach her at emma.ockerman@yahooinc.com.
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