Harris started looking for his first real job months before his graduation from UC Davis this spring. He had a solid résumé, he thought: a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of advice. he would move anywhere on the West Coast, living out of his car if he had to. He would accept a temporary,part-time,or seasonal gig,not just a full-time position. He would do anything from filing paperwork to digging trenches to build his dream career protecting californias wildlife and public lands.
He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded.
Right now, millions of would-be workers find themselves in a similar position. Corporate profits are strong, the jobless rate is 4.3 percent, and wages are climbing in turn. But payrolls have been essentially frozen for the past four months. The hiring rate has declined to it’s lowest point since the jobless recovery following the Great Recession. Four years ago, employers were adding four or five workers for every 100 they had on the books, month in and month out. Now they are adding three.
At the same time,the process of getting a job has become a late-capitalist nightmare. Online hiring platforms have made it easier to find an opening but harder to secure one: Applicants send out thousands of AI-crafted résumés, and businesses use AI to sift through them. What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market,contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.
Every time Harris logged in to LinkedIn or Indeed, he would see scores of gigs that seemed like they might be a good fit. He would read a posting carefully, scrub his résumé, tailor an introductory note, answer the company’s screening questions, hit send, hope for the best, and hear nothing in response-again and again and again.
Other job seekers described similar experiences. In suburban Virginia,a paralegal named Martine got laid off by a government contractor in April. (Like Harris, she did not want to dim her employment prospects by providing her full name.) She saw plenty of jobs being advertised at nonprofits, law firms, consultancies, and universities.She sent out dozens of applications. She even got to the second round a few times. But she never came close to being hired. “I have 10 years of experience,” she told me. “I would be happy if a person told me no at this point.”
For employers,the job market is working differently too. Businesses receive countless ill-fitting applications, along with a few good ones, for each open position. Rather than poring over the submissions by hand, they use machines. In a recent survey, ch