Why 2025 was hell for job hunters

There is no better window into the soul of America’s striving professional class than LinkedIn, a site that this year often seemed less like a networking platform than an extended group therapy session. Why 2025 was hell for job hunters It’s a key reason the economy felt so, so bad this year. Jordan Weissmann Jordan Weissmann is an economics and politics journalist living in Washington. To doomscroll through it was to encounter one post after another about the barren landscape for job hunters - laments about resumes silently filtered out by AI-powered gatekeepers and employers ghosting candidates midway through their interview process. Users with little green “#OpenToWork” banners on their avatars - the cheery mark of the damned - commiserated about sending dozens if not hundreds of applications out into the ether without luck. Key takeaways Outside of early Covid days, 2025 was by some measures the worst job market since the aftermath of the Great Recession. Young college graduates, along with certain sectors, including manufacturing and Big Tech, faced particularly tough hiring environments. Trump’s immigration and tariff policies are partially to blame, but some economists say that other causes predate his presidency. “After nearly eight months of unemployment and a nonstop corporate job search in this brutal job market, I’ve pivoted,” began one such note. “I’ve made a decision to take a full-time role at Trader Joe’s.” The LinkedInners were not entirely imagining things: 2025 was by many measures the worst year to be looking for a job since Barack Obama was still in the Oval Office. Amid an atmosphere of economic uncertainty, hiring ground to its slowest pace in over a decade, excluding the first months of the pandemic. It was a tough time to find new employment whether you were a manufacturing worker, a 20-something just out of college, or one of the many “innovative project managers” or “skilled PR pros” who have frayed their nerves fruitlessly updating online resumes and refreshing their “top job picks for you” tab. “If you need a new job right now - whether you’re a recent grad or have been unlucky enough to suffer a layoff - the market is bad,” Guy Berger, a workforce economist at Guild, told me. “Arguably not just bad, but terrible.” Nobody’s hiring US employment growth has been weak at best for most of this year - and possibly nonexistent, if you believe the Federal Reserve. Even if you set aside the federal workforce, which now has a smoking, DOGE-shaped crater in it, the US has added just 50,000 new jobs per month since May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That would be its worst stretch since 2010, aside from the early days of Covid-19. (With the federal cuts, we’re adding a paltry 17,000 a month.) But the reality may be even grimmer than those official figures let on. Fed chair Jerome Powell has said that the government may actually be overstating its tally of new jobs by about 60,000 per month, because...

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