Getting laid off can lead to months of uncertainty. But what happens when those months turn into years? When Jacob Sandy left his job as a software engineer in December 2023, he never imagined that he’d still be without work more than two years later.
At the time, the tech industry was undergoing massive job cuts, a response to overzealous hiring during the pandemic. Sandy’s employer, a cloud computing platform that helps automate business workflows, did not engage in sweeping layoffs. But he said he began to suspect his employer wanted its staff to quit voluntarily.
“It just felt like they were making it miserable and hoping we’d leave,” said Sandy, who lives in San Diego with his school age son. “And for whatever reason, I decided that was the better option.”
Sandy said that his first year of unemployment was largely his own choice and that being without a job was initially good for his mental health, until it wasn’t.
“I had prepared financially for a year, and I probably started looking very lightly after about six months,” he said. “But what I noticed is all of the recruiting systems around that time were starting to switch over to a more automated, or AI influenced, system. And so I was getting completely ghosted on any applications.”
For workers across all sectors, hiring has slowed. While January’s jobs report showed stronger than expected growth, a deeper look at newly updated government data revealed that employers added just 181,000 jobs last year, an anemic rate of hiring and more than a million fewer jobs than previously believed. The unemployment rate has also edged up to 4.3% from 4.0% a year ago.
“The hires rate today looks a lot like the hires rate did coming out of the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “And you pretty clearly see that the labor market softened over the years. We saw that payroll employment growth slowed pretty substantially.” The stagnant job market, with little hiring or firing, makes it harder for unemployed workers to find their next job. One in four jobless workers is considered long-term unemployed, meaning they have been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, the highest rate since the pandemic.
Akilah Adams, an executive assistant based in Atlanta who has been looking for work since June 2025, echoed Sandy’s frustration with the lackluster job market.
“Right now, it’s just an extremely different market than any market that I’ve been unemployed in,” said Adams, who worries that she will have to settle for a lower paying job. She’s encountered several scams during her job search, including an interview with an AI chatbot that offered to hire her on the spot in exchange for personal information.
Full article @ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/03/01/unemployed-struggling-to-find-work/88903339007/