When 42-year-old Jacob Trigg lost his job as a project manager in the tech industry he didn't think it would take too long to find a new one - he always had before.
But more than 2,000 job applications later he is still hunting, trying to make ends meet with jobs in package delivery and landscaping.
"It's a huge surprise because I've always been able to get a job very easily," said Trigg, who lives in Texas. "It wasn't even on my radar to be prepared for more than six months of unemployment. It wasn't in my universe."
His difficulties are an indication of a wider freeze in the US labour market, where job openings and hiring rates have dropped to multi-year lows.
Last year the US added an average of just 15,000 jobs a month, very few by historic standards.
The employment slowdown has raised concern about the health of the economy, but evidence of wider deterioration is elusive.
Layoffs have remained limited, apart from some high-profile cuts at firms such as Amazon and UPS and the unemployment rate has held steady at around 4.3%. Meanwhile, the wider economy continues to grow, expanding at a robust annual pace of 4.4% in the most recent figures.
It's a puzzling, and unusual, mix.
"It's actually very hard to point to another moment in the last 25 years where you have the combination we see today," said Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Trigg said he was "battening down the hatches" and hoping that whatever is causing the situation will pass.
But there are growing questions about whether the challenges he is facing could be here to stay.
Last October the investment bank Goldman Sachs put out a report, which was widely cited, suggesting the US could be facing a new period of "jobless growth" thanks to the arrival of new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, allowing companies to do more with fewer workers.
Concerns about the wider implications of such a change pulsed through discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month and have contributed to widespread economic anxiety in the US.
Economics professor Constantin Burgi of University College, Dublin, said a decoupling of job gains and wider growth - like the one the US is seeing today - often occurs when an economy goes through a structural shift, like the advent of AI.
He noted while AI's promise remains hotly debated, technology has also made outsourcing even easier.
In Burgi's view the situation is likely temporary – but that does not mean it will be short-lived.
"It can be a couple of months but it can also be a couple of years," he said. "If the jobs are really lost due to outsourcing or AI, then unless we find in a couple of years actually we still need those people and replacing them didn't work, then those jobs are gone."
For those in the trenches looking for work, the search is demoralising, regardless of its cause.
James Richardson, a 33-year-old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said without help from his parents, he would be homeless. He has applied to more than 1,200 jobs since being let go from his role as an information security analyst for a government contractor in October.
Sometimes his application is rejected within 15 minutes of submission, he said.
"It feels like there is no-one on the other side even bothering to take a look at your experiences and credentials."
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