The Job Market is Blooming, but Why Can’t I Find a Job?
“Right now, if you have a pulse, you will get hired,” a rough quote by Journalism Professor Gabriel Kahn from a few weeks ago. Indeed, after the layoffs and loss of jobs during the pandemic, the job market has been on the rise since the mid-2020s due to the post-quarantine/post-pandemic hiring surge. Companies that were forced to close down or cut down employees are back in business and hiring back the people. The graph beneath of the United States job opening shows that the job market is indeed growing as job openings increased dramatically in the past one or two years.
Table 1. United States Job Opening
However, I have a pulse, but I can’t seem to find a single decent job posting fit for me. Why? I dug a bit deeper and I got surprising news. Amidst the job market bloom, the industry I was looking for jobs in, the tech industry, is in a hiring freeze. Why? Because tech companies like Google and Facebook have been predicting economic instability and even a recession. These companies hire a quarter ahead of time because talent is hard to find. So when they think that there is going to be a loss of profit in the next quarter, they resort to layoffs and hiring freezes this quarter. Recent examples of major layoff announcements are Coinbase layoffs of 1,100 employees, Microsoft layoffs in July, and Google hiring freeze in July.
Another reason is that during the post-pandemic hiring splurge, the big tech companies hired way too many people. Looking at the graph, compared to the previous years of a steady increase in job openings, the increase in 2021 seems much steeper and more dramatic. New job openings and employment have risen to a new high. In this situation, the tech companies realize that the economy might be in a bad shape (with inflation and the Fed vowing to tame inflation with rising interest rates), so they start laying off the employees that they shouldn’t have hired in the first place. So now, companies are announcing their plans to cut back on employees. Mortgage company Blend Labs announced they were going to lay off 10% of its employees, while Robinhood announced it was cutting its employees by 9%. Some companies announced even bigger layoffs, like the financial platform MainStreet cutting as much as 30% of its staff.
So moving forward, what should we expect of the labor market? Notice in table 1, at the very end of 2022, the increase started to taper off. This perhaps is a reflection of the tech hiring freeze. What’s next? Do job openings maintain at that level? I believe that tech companies are essentially the leading indicators of the job market; they responded to the potential downturn of the economy first. Following these labor freezes, other companies will start to realize they might have bitten more than they can chew, and start laying off employees as well. Especially as interest rates rise (and are expected to keep rising), unemployment is also predicted to rise. So can someone with a pulse still easily find a job now? Perhaps. But in the near future, probably not. The conclusion is I might be graduating at the wrong time.
