While the United States collectively has been trying to figure out how to navigate the ongoing economic fallout from the disastrous policies that have been put into place over the last 14 or so months, things have steadily gone from bad to worse for the unemployed here at home, including myself. Tariffs, run away inflation, and now the impact from the price of oil skyrocketing, all of this is causing everything to be more expensive while more and more people are losing their income.

Across the country, an average of 1-2 million people are being laid off each month, and not always in a high profile mass layoff from a large corporation that you might hear about on the news. Between unpredictable and illegal tariffs, DOGE-related budget cuts, CEOs thinking that every job except their own can be outsourced to AI, and the general sense that the US economy is crumbling to dust in front of all our eyes, employees in every industry imaginable are looking over their shoulders to keep an eye out for the metaphorical axe. And with good reason; almost 21 million people suffered an involuntary separation from work in 2025 alone.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 25% of unemployed Americans are suffering from long-term unemployment, meaning that they have been searching for a job for over 6 months, which also means they have likely burned through their maximum unemployment insurance benefits. Unemployment insurance benefits vary state to state, but in many states, a person can only receive unemployment insurance benefits for a maximum of 6 months, and the benefit only replaces, on average nationally, less than 40% of the person’s previous salary for the duration they are receiving the payments.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that approximately 7.6 million people are unemployed in the United States as of February 2026. Of those 7.6 million people, a reported 6 million are actively seeking employment. However, those numbers typically do not reflect the underemployed (e.g., a person who has to work multiple jobs to get by, or someone who has taken on temporary employment while they continue to look for work in their field, etc.), nor do they reflect people who would like a job but who have become so discouraged they have given up regularly looking for employment. Even still, there are reportedly more than 1 million more Americans searching for work than there are available positions, and that’s to say nothing about whether the available jobs pay a living wage or are otherwise compatible roles for the people searching.

What these numbers don’t reflect are the changes to the actual job market landscape that have happened over the course of the last 2 or so years. If you haven’t actively been searching for work in that time, a lot of these changes may come as somewhat of a surprise to you.

I was laid off in the beginning of February 2025, exactly 2 weeks after Trump’s inauguration for his second term. In the intervening time between then and now when I am writing this post in March of 2026, I have applied to almost 500 jobs, and I’ve received 0 offers. Zero. Zilch. None. I have had interviews in that time, and have even made it to the final round, but each time I ultimately was not selected for one reason or another.

I can hear it now: “But Kelly, surely you just must not have enough experience or be qualified for the roles to which you’re applying?” Dear reader, I have a decade of experience in my field, with about 15 years of various types of customer service experience on top of that, and I have been continuing to upskill while unemployed. I have applied to all manner of positions, most of them with job descriptions that read like they were pulled directly from my resume. I make sure to tailor my resume for each job, I use keywords from the job posting, I try networking where and when I can. Yet here I am, still unemployed over 13 months later, with no real prospects on the horizon.

Unfortunately, my experience is far from unique. So, what’s the deal? Beyond even the issues already laid out above, job seekers are in to-this-point-uncharted territory.

Before an applicant even submits a resume anywhere, they first must wade through a veritable sea of scams, fake job postings, and ghost jobs. The quantity of scams trying to steal personal information (and more) from desperate job seekers has exploded. There are fake recruiters reaching out to job seekers on platforms like LinkedIn, pretending to represent legitimate companies. Then there are real employers who post jobs they never intend on filling. The motives of these employers vary; sometimes they are looking to gauge the job market, maybe they are collecting resumes for a potential future role, or maybe they’re required to post a job externally even if they’ve already picked an internal candidate. Sometimes the same job just gets posted over and over, month after month, ad infinitum. Regardless, these job postings waste applicants’ time, often steal at least the applicants’ data, and clog up job boards.

Once they have waded through the mess of job postings to find a suitable job worth applying for, one of the biggest and most immediate barriers that face the unemployed are Applicant Tracking Systems, or ATS. ATS programs aren’t exactly new, but they are being used in new and exciting terrible ways. An ATS is meant to help a company keep track of the application, resume, and other materials for candidates who have applied for a given job opening. It is meant to keep things organized since there are often hundreds of applicants for a single available role. However, with the advent of Let’s Shove AI Into Every Conceivable Nook and Cranny of Everything in Existence, many (most?) of these ATS programs now also “filter” candidates, often based on keyword matching between the candidate’s resume and the job posting. I put “filter” in scare-quotes because frankly they are not doing a great job of ensuring that the resumes of qualified candidates are actually being put in front of hiring managers consistently.

Part of the problem with companies using ATS to filter candidates is that these programs are not sophisticated enough to recognize when the applicant has used different phrasing than what was used in the job posting. This means that a candidate who meets or even exceeds every single requirement and wish list item in the job posting may never even have their resume viewed by an actual person before it’s discarded, simply because the applicant knows how to use a thesaurus. You can see where this issue would have vast implications at scale when there are potentially hundreds of resumes for a single job opportunity being cast aside without ever even being viewed by another human being.

In order to avoid falling through the cracks created by ATS filtering, candidates are often spending significant amounts of time optimizing their resumes for roles that they are interested in, in addition to creating a custom cover letter. This translates to hundreds of hours of additional unpaid labor in service of just trying to get a call or email back for an interview. Even if the applicant makes use of an LLM or other AI-based tool to assist with this optimization, the output from these tools is often flawed if not entirely fabricated. When I tried out asking Claude to help me optimize my resume for a specific role, it repeatedly included a degree and experience I don’t have in its suggested edits to my resume, even after being told not to include these things.

If an applicant is lucky enough to have applied to a legitimate job, made it through the ATS, and has been selected for an interview, they then have a depressingly high probability of facing another fun, new trend in the hiring process: being ghosted. Spend 10 minutes scrolling the feed on LinkedIn, and you’ll come across at least 1 person (probably several) talking about a recent experience where they were ghosted by HR or the hiring manager after starting the interview process with a company, often after multiple rounds of interviews and assessments, even when they received nothing but positive feedback. This can and often does lead to people foregoing other interviews and opportunities based on the feedback they received before being ghosted. I have even encountered LinkedIn posts where the person was ghosted after having received a job offer. AFTER RECEIVING A JOB OFFER. What does a person even do with that?

Even if an applicant isn’t ghosted, chances are they are receiving a lot of automated rejection emails. The practice of using automated rejection emails in and of itself isn’t bad; in fact, they help to provide closure so that you can at least cross a company off your list and move on. But they are often demoralizing in a way that’s hard to articulate. Especially since so many of them use identical or near-identical language, usually some variation of “we received an overwhelming number of applicants, and while we’re flattered you’d consider [Company], we’re moving forward with other candidates who better align with our requirements.” You wouldn’t mind, except it’s almost always the jobs where you check every box in the job description where they say they went with someone whose skills align better with their needs. It’s difficult to not develop a complex about it when you’ve amassed enough of these automated rejections that you could wallpaper the interior of your house with them if you printed them all out.

What’s more is that even being referred by an existing employee doesn’t seem to help an applicant’s odds of even getting an interview anymore, despite its former status as the gold standard for at least guaranteeing your resume would be seen by a human being and therefore hopefully considered for the role. While it’s still better than applying to a company cold, an employee referral often does not go as far as it did at one time, not all that long ago.

I don’t know what we do to fix a lot of this stuff. I’ve been trying to find new work for over 13 months now, and things don’t look any more optimistic this March than they did last March. Applying for retail, food service, hospitality, call centers, and other customer service jobs has not yielded any better results either. In addition to applying for roles directly in my field, I have applied to a fair number of customer service positions in the last year, both locally and for remote work, and I have not heard back from a single one, not even an automated rejection email. I have A LOT of customer service experience, and it’s something I excel at (much to my chagrin). Where possible when applying locally, I have included information with my application acknowledging that while I’ve been in software for the last decade, I’m interested in steady employment that’s close to where I live at this point so I can keep a roof over my head. It’s been over a year since I’ve seen a paycheck, so I feel like that should be pretty obvious even where it hasn’t been said directly.

Short of every single data center being dismantled and converted into something else entirely, a lot of the larger issues probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon. As long as we exist under capitalism, companies will always be looking to save money on labor costs, which means the promise of AI (which of course includes no longer needing to employ people in the first place, by extension) will almost certainly continue to be a problem for workers and job seekers alike. But even if everything AI-related disappeared overnight, there are still a lot of other things that need to be fixed with the job market in general.

So I guess for now, we’re all stuck in this nightmare together.