When Philip Kowalski lost his job earlier this year as a USAID contractor working on aid to Ukraine due to Doge cuts, he was confident in his credentials: a master’s degree from the University of London and years of hands-on experience managing American foreign aid contracts that he thought would help him land on his feet.
Instead, he found himself adrift in what he calls “a massive pool of unemployed people who are highly qualified all competing for the same tiny pool of available jobs”.
“I’ve put out maybe 400 job applications in the last five months,” Kowalski said. “I’ve only gotten a handful of interviews. I think I’ve interviewed with six different places. It’s a really bleak situation.”
Kowalski, 36, is far from alone. From the tech-centric coasts to the US deep south, job seekers describe a market where even advanced degrees, decades of experience and thousands of applications often yield little more than silence or, often, scam calls.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced on Tuesday that the US added 911,000 fewer jobs than first estimated for the year to March 2025, highlighting already heightened concerns about the health of the labor market.
The news followed a lackluster August jobs report, with only 22,000 jobs added in the US. That report noted that 13,000 jobs were lost for the month of June 2025, the first negative jobs report survey since December 2020, the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, the highest rate since 2021.
Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of labor statistics, was fired by Trump after a weak job’s report in July, which the president claimed, without evidence, was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.
Long-term unemployment has also climbed, with 1.9 million Americans out of work for at least 27 weeks as of August 2025, double the figure from early 2023. At the same time, underemployment is growing: more people are working part-time involuntarily, or accepting jobs far below their skill level simply to secure benefits or cover bills.
The sluggish market is due in part to the uncertainty added by Trump’s tariffs, while automation and artificial intelligence are compounding these struggles. Hiring platforms and applicant tracking systems rely heavily on keyword filters, which can exclude qualified candidates who don’t use the precise terms. Recent research has also linked AI adoption to higher unemployment in certain fields.
The gap between official statistics and lived experience is stark and growing. Taylor Napier, a 32-year-old from Kentucky, thought finishing her MBA would open new doors. Instead, she says she graduated “in what is apparently the most difficult year to get a job with an MBA in the history of the degree”.
Napier has sent “over 2,000 applications over the last six months”, tailoring multiple resumes for roles in consulting, healthcare operations, HR and sales. Yet she says “very few people reach out for an interview anymore. It’s mostly scams that contact me.”
She points to what she sees as systemic problems: AI-driven hiring tools that “aren’t really catching actually qualified people”, a reliance on networking that collapses when “companies are laying off thousands, tens of thousands of global employees” and entry-level roles vanishing under automation.
“The bottleneck is going to happen when, 15 to 20 years from now, your middle management is looking to retire, and you don’t have any new fresh blood coming in,” Napier said.
For Hayden, a 46-year-old former software executive, the decline has been just as clear. He once served as chief operating officer of a tech company. Now, he works in a warehouse “in order to have insurance for my family”.
Hayden has applied to “north of 100 jobs in the past 18 months”, spending $1,000 on professional resume services optimized for AI filters. But he says employers’ reliance on algorithms and inexperienced screeners often derails qualified candidates.
“One of the primary concerns with screenings is that you have extremely under-qualified people doing the screenings and conducting the initial interviews,” he said. “I had an interview with a major bank a few weeks ago. I’m a former COO of a software company, and the early 20s interviewer was asking me if I’ve ever used technology in my previous positions. I asked her if she’d actually read my resume.”
He describes the market as “heavily tilted towards employers”, where job postings sometimes serve more to build resume databases than to fill roles.
“One of the largest misconceptions and misdirections that has been done in the past year is to create the illusion that there isn’t an employment crisis,” Hayden said. “There absolutely is.”
Amanda Bradshaw, a 44-year-old creeler from Georgia, describes the job market as “like the dating scene only the recruiters are the ones swiping left”. She says she has applied to over 200 jobs but has not received a single call back. “When I call them they tell me they aren’t hiring. It’s depressing,” she said.
Despite official unemployment rates hovering around 4–5%, job seekers overwhelmingly believe the statistics hide the reality. “I would speculate that it’s at least double that,” Hayden said.
Kowalski echoed that sentiment, calling DC “ground zero” for the economic collapse: “I think that Washington DC has not bottomed out yet. There might not be a bottom because the federal government is hostile towards federal employees and contractors.
“I think that the Trump administration has turned DC even more so into a place where only the wealthiest can afford to live and make their way professionally,” he added. “You know, for an administration that fancies itself as big anti-elites, they’ve turned DC into an elites-only place.”
Napier, who currently works in nursing, says the instability has reshaped her life plans: “I’m at the age where I would like to start a family, but certainly can’t afford one. It’s become too difficult to save.”
Lexi, a 29-year-old copywriter from Oklahoma, said she was laid off in summer 2024. “In the hundreds of jobs I applied for between the time I started looking casually and when I was laid off, I didn’t get a single interview despite having over five years of experience,” she said.
She added: “My husband is in the same boat, he’s been a manager at a movie theater for 14 years and can’t find anything else. I’m on a higher dose of anxiety medication than ever before because of how bad things have gotten politically in the US and even locally in Oklahoma.”
The increasing prevalence of scams add another obstacle to the job search, including fake postings, misleading offers or predatory “opportunities.” Kowalski says he receives “about five a week minimum”. Napier said most of the rare contacts she gets are “independent contractor” roles with no benefits or security: “I’m not sure who’s taking that deal, but it seems to be sticking around.”
Even legitimate offers come with caveats. Hayden described one company offering higher salaries if workers declined health benefits: “They were going to give a substantial increase in salary if you turn down any benefits … $12,000 more a year if you did not use their medical, dental, vision,” he said.
As Napier put it: “You have a lot of people who are in the middle of their career applying for entry level roles, because, you know, any port in a storm.”