Job seekers say it's bleak out there — and now the data agrees
For those who have been applying to thousands of jobs or slogging through grueling interview rounds only to get passed over, the numbers aren't likely surprising.
"Things have ebbed and flowed," Stephanie O'Neill, a job seeker based in Los Angeles who has been on the job hunt for 10 months, told Business Insider. "A couple months ago, it seemed like it was picking up, but it appears to be slowing down again."
The July jobs report revealed that 73,000 jobs were added in July, less than the expected 106,000. The unemployment rate also increased to 4.2%, a slight increase from 4.1% in June.
Another standout detail from the report was the "larger than normal" revisions to May and June's job growth — meaning the earlier months were worse than previously thought.
Job growth was hotter a couple of years ago when there was a lot more churn during the Great Resignation. The job market has slowed down in recent years, adding to job seekers' struggles.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed to Business Insider that its commissioner was terminated on Friday following criticism from President Donald Trump who said the data was a "major mistake" and "The Economy is BOOMING under 'TRUMP.'"
A skills mismatch
Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI that the revisions "reinforced" her thinking over the last few months that the labor market is softening"considerably."
"We have a quite lopsided jobs market in terms of the jobs that are available and the skills that people have for work," Ullrich said.
Ullrich pointed to the healthcare and social assistance sector as an example. While the sector has been adding many jobs, many of those positions require specialized skill sets, education, or training.
That disconnect is something 49-year-old Damon Duncan has experienced since 2021, when he was laid off from a sales engineering role. He said he's been "underemployed" since, or doing jobs that don't fit his skill set. Duncan's now working in a cold-calling sales role with colleagues who graduated from college last year, he said.
"This has been a continuous battle for almost four years," Duncan, who's applied to thousands of roles, told BI.
O'Neill said she applied to around 512 positions and landed about 20 interviews, mostly from referrals. Despite working in tech for over two decades, she said she's been considering alternative, non-corporate career paths like teaching.
Job seeker struggles didn't start this summer
While the latest data validates how job seekers have been feeling, for many, it's been a challenging market for a while.
Job openings have slowed from over 12 million in March 2022 to a much cooler 7.4 million as of June. Quits have also slowed from its March 2022 peak during the Great Resignation as people are changing jobs less in a job market with fewer hires.
Joseph Leemon, a job seeker based in Michigan, said he's been searching for a job for nearly three years. He's applied to around 2,000 roles and he's only had four interview requests.
"I'm beginning to think that something is really amiss," Leemon told Business Insider. "Because I am not one that is trying to apply for CEO, C-suite type jobs for hundreds of thousand dollars. I am looking for mostly customer support, operations."
Another job seeker, Paul Lambert, was recently laid off from an IT support managerial role. In his two months on the job market, he said he's applied to about 100 jobs since and has only had three interviews.
"It's definitely been not easy to even be seen in this market," Lambert told Business Insider.
Despite the challenges, Lambert said his job hunt so far isn't drastically different than what he experienced after being laid off in 2023. Lambert said he had to take a low-paying job about four months into his job search at the time to take care of his family. He said it took over a year to find a job that matched what he was looking for.
Lambert said he feels like once the tariff uncertainty fades, the market will adjust. However, he said he also feels concerned about companies pausing on hiring new employees once Q4 approaches.
"That's my big concern," Lambert said. "Am I going to be able to land employment before Q4 when budgets have been spent and a lot of people really aren't hiring?"
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The jobs report that enraged Trump was flashing a recession warning sign
The bad news in last Friday's jobs report may have been overshadowed when President Donald Trump fired the commissioner in charge of producing it. But economists haven't forgotten about America's job market – and they're growing concerned. Some of the jobs report data has economists using a word they haven't uttered in several months: recession. Hiring over the past three months slowed dramatically, creating problems for the economists and statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics whose job is to make sense of the payroll data they get from thousands of businesses across the country. As new data came in about May and June's employment, the BLS was forced to sharply lower those months' job totals from their preliminary estimates. The BLS revised May and June's jobs totals lower by a combined 258,000 jobs. That massive revision gave economists some serious agita. Larger revisions have happened before, but every time changes that large have taken place over the course of at least two months, the US economy has been in a recession – at least since records began in 1968. 'The job market is terrible,' said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office during the George W. Bush administration. 'Outside of education and health, the economy has lost private sector jobs in the past three months. That's terrible.' The US economy has added an average of just 85,000 jobs per month this year, which is well below the 177,000 jobs that the economy added on average each month before the pandemic. Poor jobs data doesn't mean the US economy is in or going into a recession. Several recent economic indicators are pointing in the wrong direction – weakness in second-quarter gross domestic product and slower-than-expected growth in both the manufacturing and services sectors, for example. But, importantly, the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is responsible for declaring recessions, tracks four big indicators of economic activity – consumer spending, personal income, factory production and employment. None have been pointing to a recession or even that the US economy is on the precipice of a recession. That is, until Friday's jobs report. Yet even the recession alarms it sounded come with some caveats. Recent moribund job growth was likely distorted by business uncertainty surrounding Trump's tariffs, and it's too early to tell whether it will rebound or continue to remain at this low level, noted Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer at Truist. 'The US economy is in a muddle-through environment,' said Lerner, who said the Federal Reserve probably needs to take action to lower interest rates soon because the jobs report suggests it might be behind the curve. The Fed has known about the slowing hiring for quite some time. But the sharp pullback over the past few months – data the Fed didn't have when it made its decision last week to hold interest rates steady – probably means the economy is considerably weaker than economists had expected. 'Friday's jobs report was terrible with recessionary level numbers, but slowing hiring is not new,' said Robert Ruggirello, chief investment officer, Brave Eagle Wealth Management. 'While Friday's report does not mean we are entering a recession, it shows that companies are freezing hiring and firing until there is more policy certainty and business confidence.' Ironically, the leading culprit for slowing jobs growth may be the thing that has been holding the Fed back from cutting rates: Trump's tariffs. The Fed had been in wait-in-see mode in case tariffs pushed prices higher. The flip side is that the US economy appeared strong enough to handle higher interest rates. But it seems businesses are no longer waiting. They're freezing hiring and changing their investments as they grow fearful that tariffs could raise costs and hurt the economy. 'The president's unorthodox economic agenda and policies may be starting to make a dent in the labor market,' said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at FwdBonds. 'Businesses are not waiting as they are cutting back on the numbers of new workers they bring on board, which means we can no longer count on the employment markets to be a positive factor supporting economic growth in the weeks and months ahead.' Trump's immigration policy appears to be taking a toll, too. Since April, 1.4 million people dropped out of the US labor force – 802,000 of whom were foreign born. That may have helped make the jobs report look slightly better than it actually is. 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Official jobs numbers show it's a bad time to be looking for work—unless you're in this field
Official economic data is finally catching up to the fact that Americans have been feeling lousy about the job market for months. The U.S. economy added just 73,000 nonfarm jobs in July, according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's below market expectations and the roughly 80,000 benchmark for a healthy economy to support the growing population, says Laura Ullrich, Indeed's director of economic research for North America. A lot of economists are also paying attention to the latest report, which helps show a monthly picture of where jobs are growing and shrinking, because it downwardly revised its May and June numbers to show the economy added just 33,000 jobs over the two-month period, compared to earlier estimates of 291,000 jobs. Following the release of Friday's jobs report, President Donald Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, suggesting without evidence that the weaker-than-expected report had been "rigged" by federal workers bent on sabotaging the president. Revisions are a normal part of the data collection process, and estimates move up or down to become more precise with additional payroll data up to several months after a report releases, Ullrich tells CNBC Make It. But "these revisions took the prior two jobs report [in May and June] from a range where they looked like pretty healthy job reports to where they looked quite weak," Ullrich says. The latest numbers confirm the U.S. economy is slowing sharply, experts say. Here's what else job seekers should know about the state of the labor market: At the beginning of the year, the labor market was primarily held up by jobs across three sectors: health care and social assistance, leisure and hospitality, and government hiring. Leisure and hospitality job creation is down, driven in part by business pullback amid economic uncertainty, while government hiring is down following the Trump administration's work to slash the size of the federal government. Meanwhile, health care and social assistance have accounted for 48.8% of total employment growth over the last year, despite making up just 14.6% of the economy, Ullrich says. New jobs span nurses, nurses assistants, patient care techs, home health aides and other roles. "Hospitals employ just about everybody," Ullrich says. Hospitals added 196,000 jobs over the last year, which is 3.5% growth and "pretty strong," Ullrich says. Home health care services grew by 56,900 jobs, or 3.2%, over the last year. A majority, 78.6%, of employees in this subsector are women, meaning 35% of all employment growth in the U.S. over the past year has been among women in health care and social assistance, Ullrich says. Experts have long predicted the strength around health-care jobs to take care of an aging Baby Boomer population. "Growth in that sector has remained robust," Ullrich says. Other typically high-growth and high-paying sectors are shedding jobs, including professional and business services, manufacturing and government, which all lost more than 10,000 jobs each over the last month. Some experts have dubbed the current environment a "white collar recession" among office workers. "Business and professional services added a ton of jobs in the post-pandemic period, but over the past year or so, it's been relatively soft," Ullrich says. As for manufacturing, it's hard to say what combination of factors is keeping jobs down, whether it's new global tariffs, changing consumer habits, or overall economic uncertainty, among other things, Ullrich says. Ullrich says the latest jobs numbers are just one more data point that add to a broader challenging economic picture, which could impact business plans and consumer spending. "It's been clear through multiple sources of data, including this jobs report, that the economy is slowing down a bit, and so that can certainly impact sentiment," she says. Another troubling sign: The number of people who've been unemployed for 27-plus weeks increased by 179,000 people to 1.8 million in July, according to BLS data. Long-term unemployed people make up roughly 1 in 4 people looking for a job right now. Job postings are down on Indeed, Ullrich says, and economists have seen a disequilibrium in terms of what skills people have and what sectors are hiring. Currently, "if you are somebody that's trying to find a job in manufacturing or business and professional services, it's likely a pretty tough job market right now," Ullrich says. "If you're graduating with a nursing degree, I feel pretty confident that there's someone out there looking to hire you."
