Unemployed people are having a harder time finding jobs in the US, a trend that’s casting a shadow over other statistics showing a resilient labor market with few outward signs of trouble.

More than 40% of the roughly 7 million people looking for work have now been searching unsuccessfully for at least 15 weeks — a number rarely seen in the post-World War Two era until the global financial crisis of 2008.

The increasing length of the typical unemployment spell is one more indication that the hot job market that prevailed during the pandemic-reopening boom of 2022 and 2023 is now gone. Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist, likened current conditions to the “Twilight Zone,” the spooky 1960s-era science fiction show, in a recent Bloomberg column. Meanwhile, Alex English, a 37-year-old marketing professional in Los Angeles, is living it in real life.

“The biggest surprise has been that it’s taken so long, and that I haven’t gotten much reaction to my résumé, and that it’s taken five months,” said English, who parted ways with an online fashion company in July. If you lose your job now, “it’s a huge upward battle,” he said.

Sahm pointed in her column to an odd decoupling in the labor market in which firms generally aren’t laying off workers but aren’t really hiring much, either.

The rate of new hires as a share of total employment, however, fell to 3.3% in October, Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Tuesday showed — a figure comparable to 2013, when the unemployment rate was above 7%.

Around the country, some professional recruiters say they haven’t seen such doldrums in years. The technology sector has been hit especially hard, with software development job postings down by a third versus pre-pandemic levels, according to job board giant Indeed’s Hiring Lab.

To be sure, some of that is a reaction to the excessive hiring tech firms did during the pandemic period, said Fritz Eichelberger, who’s run a tech recruitment firm in Tampa, Florida, for two decades. He also wonders if the mass layoffs Elon Musk imposed at Twitter, now known as X, a couple years ago gave employers the idea they didn’t need as many people.

A third explanation could be a surge in labor productivity in tech and finance, possibly through the use of automation and artificial intelligence, Burning Glass Institute Chief Economist Gad Levanon said in a recent LinkedIn post.

“I haven’t seen this many highly qualified tech professionals out on such an extended job search in over 20 years,” Eichelberger said.

Knowledge Workers

In the data analytics and engineering fields, Michael Helbling is seeing more colleagues looking for work on LinkedIn than he can remember. Over the past year or so, companies have just been trying to maintain their business without launching anything too ambitious, and that’s cut demand even for hard-to-find data scientists, he said.

“Those roles have been way in demand for years and years and years,” said Helbling, who runs a data analysis firm in Atlanta. “So it’s always crazy to me that those people would be on LinkedIn as ‘open to work.’”

Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed, said there are more openings in total than there were before the pandemic, but the job market is treating different fields very differently. Like Helbling, he sees signs firms are retrenching instead of pursuing growth.

Hands-on positions, especially in healthcare, are growing steadily even as hiring has slowed in knowledge worker roles, he said. For example, job postings for personal and home care jobs are up 63% versus February 2020, and education and instruction jobs are up almost 32%. But openings for marketing positions are down 24%, and banking and finance postings are about 6% lower, according to Indeed Hiring Lab data.

Sahm, the former Fed economist now with New Century Advisors, said in an interview that uncertainty ahead of the presidential election may have led some employers to hold off on hiring decisions. Whether that starts to change now that the results are in remains to be seen.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, Jason Mesiarik, 50, was a sales executive at a firm that developed weapons-detection systems for stadiums and big event venues before losing his job around 18 months ago. He’s pursuing part-time consulting gigs and coaching some individuals, but it’s been a battle getting past the résumé screeners for full-time roles. In the past, for every four blind applications he’d submit for a job, one would show some interest. Nowadays, he says, his favorable response rate has fallen to 2%.

“It’s a real bugger right now trying to land a full-time gig,” Mesiarik said.

(With assistance from Chris Middleton.)