Is the Job Market Working?

During my job search, I've seen job postings go up, stay up for weeks or months, and then get re-posted.  So at risk of generalizing my experience, if candidates can't find jobs and companies can't find candidates, is the job market working for anyone?

Photo credit: National Archives at College Park

The Hiring Managers

In the United States, there are approximately 7 million private job openings (as of August 2025) but only 5 million job openings filled monthly. These numbers are consistent with the previous month and previous year. In a steady state job openings would have to equal hires to not increase, so that implies that 2 million jobs are disappearing unfilled per month. I've seen job openings remain open for six months (and counting), and others be pulled down and then re-posted with identical descriptions after sitting out for months. We talk about "discouraged workers" dropping out of the labor market, but what about "discouraged hiring managers"? At large companies, hiring managers are often hamstrung by their Human Resources (HR) teams where they find it hard to talk to someone not pre-vetted by HR. And they might not get any useful resumes at all - there's a story going around (picked up by several news sources but original source is Reddit so I'm not certain of its veracity) that a hiring manager fired his HR team after HR screened out every resume including the manager's own.

So it sounds like the job market isn't working for hiring managers.

The Candidates

During my job search, I've been able to fill my time, but it would still be nice to be employed again. It's always dangerous to generalize from my own experience, but I've found it remarkably difficult to get past the first screening to actually talk to a person at the company. In addition, when I've been able to network my way in (talking to a future peer, someone who knows the hiring manager, etc.), I'll often have a conversation that ends with, "You seem like a great fit, HR and/or the hiring manager will reach out to talk further," and then...crickets.

When I was last searching seriously (outside my own company) in 2019, I had no trouble getting to the "in-person interview" phase of the job hunt after several phone and online discussions. For various reasons those companies and I didn't reach agreement, but at least I could talk to people. Now in 2025, I can count on one hand the number of times that I've had direct contact with the hiring manager. To me that's the hardest part of this job hunt: the lack of feedback and follow-up by hiring teams.

Is it Working for Anyone?

The only people that I can think of that the job market might (maybe!) be working for is senior management. From some senior managers' perspective, if a team is functioning when down a person then why not make it hard to backfill that person? They're not feeling the pain of the open role or the pain of job hunting, so a market that doesn't match people isn't a bug, it's a feature.

The best senior managers do want to fill their teams with high quality people and don't want their teams to burn out, so I would hope that the job market is "working" for only a tiny minority of the people affected.

To hiring managers: if the market isn't working for you, change it. Bypass your HR when someone interesting hits your radar and talk to that someone to see if they're a good fit. If they are, then ensure HR isn't filtering out that person (or people like them). Ask your HR team about their filters: how many people come in, how many actually make it to the hiring manager? And last, make time for hiring. I know it's hard: you're already doing your job plus that of your missing people and demands from elsewhere in the business are always urgent; but it will never get better if you don't prioritize those backfills or new hires.

To everyone: best of luck with your search for either a new job or the best candidate for your job opening!