Q&A of the Day – How Hard is it to Get a New Job?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station page in the iHeart app.
Today’s entry: Hi Brian, As a listener and fellow Republican, I appreciate the way you cut through the noise and explain daily concerns with clarity and facts.
I’ve been in recruiting for many years, and I can tell you the job market has been dismal since mid-2023. Worse than most reports admit. While the BLS is only now “showing” weakness, the corrections over the past two years prove the data have been unreliable (survey return rates under 50%) with corrections well over 1M "jobs."
Here’s what I’m seeing firsthand:
- AI impact: Roughly 15-20% of certain roles are being automated away.
- PPP loans dried up: Rainy day funds dried up.
- More with less: Profits are thin, so hiring is cut back. In Florida alone, manufacturing jobs are down 31,000 in one year.
- Bottleneck at the top: Senior-level employees aren’t moving, so growth stalls.
- Internal promotions over hiring: To keep staff, companies promote internally rather than hire.
- Restless employees: Those passed over internally are only applying elsewhere for promotions, which is driving applicant pools to 400–1,000 per role competing with externals out of work. It's brutal to the likes we've never seen.
- Mid-level cuts: Companies are eliminating or consolidating middle management while barely hanging on.
A key top factor, the return to office is a major issue. People moved and are not able to get roles. Many Florida newcomers are finding this out. The list of many variables are in play. This is all on top of recent uncertainty with tariffs, but I would not say tariffs are the only concern, although it is causing more uncertainty. It's a lot of moving parts.
On top of it all, age discrimination over 40 is more blatant than ever, yet many don’t show up on “unemployment” rolls. You see it all over LinkedIn and it isn't just the squeaky wheels. While this has always happened, we've never seen ageism at these levels. Ask anyone over age 40 and looking, their average search is stretched past 27 months up to two years plus. It isn't good.
This is a market unlike anything recruiters have seen in 25+ years and it’s getting worse. The numbers are flawed in a big way. Most markets correct and replace with new titles, etc., but AI has introduced an alternative to lessen the teams they have and not add to the teams.
I wish I had better news, but this is what is happening that the media isn't discussing for over two years now.
Bottom Line: I felt it would be valuable to share this extraordinarily well crafted and presented entry in its entirety as it provides an additional level of insight to the larger discussion of what’s really going on with the labor market amid the historically negative revisions we’ve had to the government’s numbers this week, and also on the heels of last week’s disappointing reports.
Here’s a quick refresh of what’s been recently reported. Over the course of two years, that not-so-coincidently overlapped with the final two years of the Biden administration, the BLS was found to have overstated job growth by a total of 1.73 million jobs – or an average of 144,000 per month. In other words, the BLS’s monthly reports had become essentially useless, and these revisions demonstrate once again that the ADP Report, which showed consistently lower job growth, has been the far more accurate way to track private sector job growth.
Now to break down the overall significance of what we’re talking about here consider this. In 2024 the average reported job gains per month were originally reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be 186,000 per month. In reality, based on this week’s reported revisions, the actual average number of new jobs created per month would have been only about 42,000, or in other words, 78% fewer new jobs than there were said to be! But even then, that barely begins to tell the bigger story.
For the few new jobs that had been created in recent years they often weren’t going to Americans. Based on government data that I first reported on in July, what percentage of jobs added in this county during the Biden administration went natural born citizens? 59%. That’s it! 41% of the jobs added in the country during the four years of the Biden administration went to foreign-born persons.
Now some of those jobs went to legal immigrants, those on work visas, etc... but an awful lot of those jobs went to people who didn’t legally enter this country, or should I say those who gamed the asylum and TPS system under a complicit administration. So now, when you account for the number of jobs added that were available for born Americans, we’re only talking about 25,000 new jobs available per month over the prior year. Now, let’s fully break this down to show how big of a deal that really is.
Last year, due to the open border policies of the Biden administration, an estimated 230,000 jobs per month were needed be created just to keep pace with population growth...or 205,000 more jobs than were actually added. To put a finer point on this as it applies to natural born American citizens, 1.45 million fewer jobs were added last year than would have been necessary to simply maintain the employment of born Americans. This dynamic helps explain why the Labor Force Participation rate is a full point lower today than prior to the impact of the pandemic and is also a half point lower than it was in November of 2023. To the point of the recruiter who submitted today’s entry, many older Americans have been unable to find work and have dropped out of the workforce as a result. So where do we go from here?
The one immovable object in this conversation is the impact of AI in the workforce. That will take time to sort out, and there are no guarantees on what the end result will be. Independent of that dynamic there’s room for some optimism that we could be on the brink of unleashing new opportunities. Based on the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, the latest estimate for the number of new jobs needed monthly to keep pace with population growth is down from 230,000, to only 25,000 or actually less than what was reported in the ADP private sector report last week, which was 54,000.
Suddenly what used to sound like a weak number starts looking pretty good in this new context. Also, with the Federal Reserve finally set to begin cutting interest rates next week, something that’s been long overdue, that should act as an economic tailwind for many companies and especially across interest rate sensitive industries. As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts. These are the facts.