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Business Insider
05-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Offices are about to get very, very grouchy
In 2023, Kathleen, a sales manager at a software company, was given terrible news at work: She had to lay off her entire team. Her own job was spared, but surviving the bloodbath didn't leave her feeling relieved. "I felt like a traitor," she recalls. "I kept thinking, Oh, God, am I next?" After living in dread for months, she started looking for a new job. A year and a half later, she's still looking. Virtually no one has been hiring across tech, and the few jobs she's found were offering salaries far below what she's looking to earn. And now, as Donald Trump's tariffs have thrown the economy into turmoil and uncertainty, she fears it will take even longer to move on from her employer. That means she has to keep going to work, day after day, to a job she no longer wants to do. She feels herself getting more and more bitter — and she admits she's become pretty checked out on the job. "I'm just over it," she says. Much attention has been paid to the fear that Trump's trade war will stoke inflation. But his on-again, off-again tariffs are already having another, more immediate effect: They're discouraging employers from hiring. White-collar professionals like Kathleen are finding themselves stuck in jobs they've been trying to leave for years, creating a simmering brew of pent-up frustration and low morale. Last year, employee engagement dropped to its lowest level in a decade — and the chaos created by Trump's tariffs could soon make the mounting dissatisfaction even worse. "People are increasingly grumpy because they can't change jobs," says Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. "Even in a relatively optimistic case, this could go on for a while." An unmotivated workforce isn't just bad for workers — it's bad for their employers. Studies have shown that employee disengagement results in lower sales, higher customer dissatisfaction, and smaller profits. Gallup estimates that low engagement is already costing businesses trillions of dollars worldwide — a bill that's likely to climb as more and more employees sour on jobs they're unable to leave. What's more, an extended standstill can choke off economic growth. A healthy job market needs a certain amount of churn to move workers into jobs that make better use of their talents. Otherwise people get stuck in jobs they've outgrown, earning lower wages than their experience and skills merit. A job market that's frozen in place can slow economic growth for years to come. Ever since the pandemic, when layoffs hit the fastest pace since the Great Depression, companies have struggled to stabilize their staffing levels. Economists have been calling the current hiring standstill the Big Stay. Late last year, that appeared to be coming to an end as a growing share of employers reported that they were preparing to hire more workers. But ever since Trump took office, it has started to look like the Big Stay could become the Endless Stay. "Firms that were planning on expanding are putting those expansion plans on ice," says Berger. "Some baseline level of uncertainty is now semipermanently in the mix. A lot of things that people thought were previously outside the realm of reality have suddenly become big risks." A customer support manager I'll call Dean started looking for a new job seven months ago. He realized that he'd hit a ceiling at the tech company he works for, and he was eager for a new challenge. "I know I'm being underutilized," he says. "I don't want my skills to get rusty." Late last year, he was starting to feel optimistic he would land something soon. But now he's worried his search could stretch out a lot longer — perhaps through Trump's entire presidency. "How do I make it through this storm?" he says. "Do I sit still, or do I go back on the hunt? I can't just wait it out for this to pass. This is the new world we're in." The economic uncertainty also means that employees who are fed up at work can't afford to quit their jobs without having another lined up. Laurie, an auditor at an energy company, has been so miserable that she has saved up what she calls a "fuck you fund" — enough money to rage-quit her job if things got really bad. The fund is big enough to tide her over for up to a year, which she thought would give her more than enough time to find a new job. But not anymore. "I'm afraid the economy is turning to shit right now," she says. "Realistically, if you leave now, you could very possibly be unemployed for more than a year." All this prolonged unhappiness doesn't just affect the employees who feel stuck in their jobs — it makes the office unpleasant for everyone. People can't acknowledge they're fed up with work, but their unspoken frustration comes out in other ways. "My tolerance level for bullshit is so low now," Laurie says. "My patience is wearing thin." Kathleen, who used to pride herself on her positivity, worries that her resentment is starting to seep through. "I just have a shorter fuse," she says. "I used to be happy to put in the extra mile. And I'm just not willing to do that anymore." It's like the office version of being in an unhappy marriage. If your coworkers feel trapped, it's hard for anyone to enjoy themselves. Companies, of course, aren't powerless in a frozen job market. As the Big Stay threatens to turn into the Endless Stay, some employers can opt to shake things up — effectively forcing some churn into the labor market by firing old employees to make room to hire new ones. Companies like Meta and Microsoft appear to be doing exactly that, pushing out those they deem to be " low performers" while simultaneously going on a hiring blitz for AI engineers. Dissatisfaction at work, after all, can come from above as well as below. But the new round of layoffs has left employees who are ready to move on feeling even more trapped. Having no job, they know, is way worse than being stuck in a mediocre one. Kathleen, the sales manager, has seen what it's like for her friends who are unemployed. She knows she's lucky to be earning enough money to pay her mortgage and send her kids to summer camp, even if she doesn't love doing the job that earns her that money. Some people might be fine with that — treating a job as just a job — but Kathleen has always been an overachiever. She loves putting everything she has into work. She misses feeling that drive, and she knows she'll feel it again once she's in the right job. And that, in a nutshell, is the ultimate price we're paying for the Endless Stay. With everyone stuck in place, we're unable to tap into the kind of enthusiasm that inspires everyone to bring their best selves to their jobs, and to give it their all. Maybe a lot of low performers are just performers who are feeling low. "I want to put the work in," Kathleen says. "I want to do all the stuff. It's been a long time since I've felt that kind of fire. I'm starting to wonder if it will ever get better."
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
New Data Provide a Pre-Tariff Snapshot of a Stable but Slowing Labor Market
The labor market remained sound in March, with job openings declining but layoffs remaining near record lows, while rates of new hiring were slow but steady, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday. The numbers from last month are a snapshot of the state of the U.S. economy and labor market before the start of the global trade volatility brought on by President Trump's tariff campaign. 'It reflects a labor market that 'could have been,' given the damage tariffs will do,' argued Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, which studies the labor market. 'We have the foundations of a labor market stabilization,' he added, 'but trade policy has other ideas.' The prevailing environment before April of subdued hiring and few firings was not an easy one for active job seekers, especially in certain sectors like tech and manufacturing. But the stability of the overall job market was undeniable — so much so that some labor economists started to worry that the conditions bordered on stagnant. Now, the economy is facing a radically different set of challenges. Consumer sentiment has plunged since January, when the import taxes were announced by the White House, as fears of both job loss and higher inflation have surged among households and top business leaders. The effects of the tariffs on shipping have not yet been fully felt. But experts in global freight logistics, such as Craig Fuller, the founder of FreightWaves, expect that to change in the coming days and weeks as companies face tariffs ranging from 10 percent to well over 120 percent on many Chinese goods. Federal job openings declined by 36,000 in March, a result of the Trump administration's steep cutbacks to the federal civil service. And in the overall labor market, job openings fell by 288,000. Some financial analysts are focused on a broader, monthslong pre-tariff slowdown. 'The main story is that job openings are down,' said Neil Dutta, the head of economics at the research firm Renaissance Macro. 'We are at the point where opening declines push up unemployment.' The jobs report for April will help fill out some of the economic picture. Economists expect unemployment to have been largely unchanged and for moderate job growth to have continued. But forecasters are bracing for surprises because of the uncertainty surrounding the tariffs. The employment picture and consumer spending remain bright for now — a point that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emphasized in his public remarks. But many analysts, including Daniel Altman, the chief economist at Instawork, a job search and recruitment site, are in wait-and-see mode. 'I think the jobs report will be more revealing,' Mr. Altman said.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Workers without college degrees make progress in slowing a grim trend, new report shows
Workers without college degrees have, for some time, faced declining opportunities in the workforce. However, new data signals that this may be changing, a sign that hiring managers are less focused on educational attainment and more focused on skills than they were in years past. The Dow Jones Industrial Average set a startling record that shows just how flawed it truly is Venus, Saturn planet parade will make a rare smiley face with the crescent moon: Best time to see April 2025 triple conjunction Can these tiny house villages bring new life to small towns? That's according to new research from Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit focused on increasing career opportunities for people who lack college degrees but are 'skilled through alternative routes' (STARs). The research, which analyzed trends in so-called paper ceilings, finds that from 2000 to 2020, 70% of newly created jobs often required a college degree. However, over the past five years, STARs, or people who have attained a skill set without earning a college degree (for instance, via an apprenticeship or another route), started to regain up to 10% of those jobs, the research found. In other words, while workers without degrees continue to see their share of good-paying jobs decline, the downward trend has at least slowed, which the report attributes to shifting habits in hiring. 'This report shows what is possible when awareness and behavior change together: Job postings are measurably more open to STARs than in the early 2000s,' Opportunity@Work CEO Byron Auguste said in a statement. 'If we want our country to grow together—not apart—amid transformative technological and economic change, the starting point is to value all skills. And if we value all skills, STARs will rise.' This may be good news for job seekers who don't have a college degree or aren't especially keen on earning one, perhaps due to up-front costs. The average cost of a four-year academic degree in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2000, increasing roughly 4% per year. Meanwhile, additional research has shown an uptick in skills-based hiring and a decline in degree requirements. From 2014 to 2023, there was a near-fourfold increase in the number of roles from which degree requirements were dropped, according to researchers from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute. 'For the last 20 years, many employers' practices appear to assume that having no college degree means you don't have skills,' Erica L. Groshen, senior economic adviser at Cornell University's ILR School, said in a statement. Groshen, a former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner and current chair of the STARs Insights Advisory Panel, added, 'Today, Opportunity@Work provides further evidence to refute that narrative.' This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter: Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
08-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Employers Including Blackstone, Walmart, And Microsoft, Increasing Focus On Skills Over College Degrees
'In a time where people might say there's no opportunities for inclusion in the workforce, we actually think that skills-first hiring is a way to say there are opportunities for everybody,' says Donna Morris, chief people officer at Walmart. Getty Images With rising costs, student protests and looming budget cuts, sentiment on the power of a college degree continues to sour. Now, top employers, while not abandoning the need for top college grads, are leaning into specific skills instead of degrees to find the right talent. The Skills-First Workforce Initiative, led by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Burning Glass Institute, is launching a career website outlining the skills needed for some of the most in-demand jobs in the market. The SkillsFirst website details skills needed for nine job titles –retail salesperson; first-line supervisors of retail sales workers; sales managers; customer service representatives; customer service managers; financial analysts; product managers; and software developers. These roles account for over 11 million workers, according to Burning Glass. Joining the non-profit in this new initiative are ten of America's largest employers, including Accenture, Bank of America, Blackstone, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PepsiCo, Walmart and Verizon in the launch. 'Just being able to understand and define the skills required for a job, it sounds simple but it's actually a really big exercise,' says Matt Siegelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute. Skills-based hiring has grown in popularity in the last year, especially as diversity, equity and inclusion programs have come under attack. In September, the Department of Labor released a starter kit for employers looking to change their degree requirements. Advice included a sample rubric for 'people skills,' a list of on-the-job scenarios and interview questions. But since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, the department has overhauled its offerings. A link to the recently published toolkit has been deleted and leads to an error page, though it is still available through the WayBack Machine. Now the private sector is stepping in. Though discussions among Walmart, Burning Glass and the other employers have been ongoing for over a year, the launch of the website marks the first public release of specific language both employers and employees can rely on to describe job skills. 'This is noncompetitive in nature,' says Donna Morris, chief people officer at Walmart. 'Each of these companies have their own hiring objectives, their own behavioral expectations that layer together with skills.' Two candidates with the same skills may be better fits for different companies. The companies in the coalition are also not direct competitors, covering a range of industries from finance to retail and pharmaceuticals. The website lists four different groups of skills––baseline, leadership, role-specific skills and specialization––required for each position, assigning a percentage of importance and proficiency level for each skill. Take the breakdown for a product manager. Baseline skills include knowing the '4 Ps' of marketing (product, price, place and promotion) and experience leading complex sales negotiations. But the most important, and in-demand, skills come in the role-specific competencies like using market research to accurately predict the lifecycle of a product. Each is assigned a level of mastery and how important, on average, the skill is to employers. Burning Glass says this is determined by their proprietary model, which pulls data from a database of tens of millions of job postings, analyzes how each job is described and pulls out common skills, and input from the 11 employers in the coalition. The site also offers information on job-specific specializations, like computer science or user experience (UX). A software engineer for example needs to be able to write, troubleshoot and debug code while documenting changes in Git. But perhaps the most helpful information for job seekers is a skill's wage premium, which reflects how much employers are willing to pay a premium for. For example, companies are willing to pay a 5% wage premium to product managers with UX experience, a 3.9% wage increase to software engineers who know Python and an 8.3% bump to those working in open-source platforms like Kubernetes. Such specific language can be specially useful for non-traditional hires like veterans, who struggle to translate their experience in the armed forces to corporate America. It's how employers can not only hire the right people, but deepen their talent pool, according to Sheri Bronstein, chief people officer at Bank of America The launch of the website comes at a complex time in the labor market. The U.S. economy added about 228,000 jobs in March, more than forecasted, but unemployment increased slightly in the same month and DOGE-led cuts in the federal government will have ripple effects throughout private sectors. Add in fears of a looming recession and incoming tariffs on nearly all imports, and many businesses have paused their hiring and are reconsidering their 2025 plans. It's left employees increasingly feeling stuck, unmotivated and unproductive. 'There's a lot of reasons why the workforce may be disillusioned right now,' says Walmart's Morris. 'But as employers we can provide some hope and focus on investing in our people to optimize their success.' A standard skills language becomes a way for employers to educate, motivate and be transparent with their workforces about what it takes to continue to grow. The unified skills language makes working on a desired promotion that much easier. The path from customer service representative to manager, for example, includes gaining leadership skills, coaching experience and account management experience. But the power comes in being able to use that language defining skills and transferring it from one employer to the next. A unified language for 'skills become a currency that [employees] can use to apply for that new job internally or externally,' says Morris. Employers joining the initiative have already seen an impact on their own hiring practices and employee satisfaction. Verizon, which says 99% of their roles do not require degrees, streamlined its repository of 70,000 job titles down to 2,100 different roles when first implementing its skills-first approach in 2021. The company boasts an average tenure of 13.1 years, 70% more than the national average of 3.9 years, which it credits to its career growth opportunities. Skills-first gave Verizon employees the transparency needed to see the path towards a promotion across different roles, says its chief human resources officer Samantha Hammock. 'When you start thinking about where your skills match into other roles, it opens a window of visibility into a whole new world of [job opportunities],' she adds. It's a similar case at Walmart, which prides itself over the fact that 75% of its store managers, who have a base pay of $130,000 can occasionally earn more than $500,000 a year, started in hourly positions. Skills training has raised customer and store cleanliness satisfaction scores in the top third of stores participating in training, and front-line workers are now promoted to a new role within an average of seven months. Demarcating declining or in-demand skills is another benefit for early-career folks using the website, especially those deciding what job to take up in a quickly evolving labor market. 'Talent scarcity across the economy is requiring companies to rethink and rewire their hiring practices,' says Courtney della Cava, global head of portfolio talent and organization performance at Blackstone, which will be implementing skills-first approaches across its over 250 portfolio companies. Such practices are not just a way to increase retention, but also anticipate future skills needs. It's already happening. Take 'AI prompt engineering', where coders train AI large language models in answering questions, a skill required for software engineers that has become a top priority in 2024, according to Burning Glass. It was in virtually all descriptions for software engineers, but when Open AI and its competitors updated their chatbots to get better at answering prompts that were sometimes vague, the skill disappeared, reveals Erik Leiden, managing director of workforce strategy at Burning Glass. They had to ultimately remove the skill from the job page. 'There are skills that are growing in popularity now that will decline, and there are skills that will hit the radar that aren't on the radar now,' he adds. The nonprofit says it will continuously update the skills needed for each job, using AI to keep track of requirement changes in job postings across its database. Burning Glass is also already planning to expand the library of jobs and accompanying skillsets in the coming months. In its second phase, the website will host career pathways for 30 job titles, including wholesale sales representatives, security guards, shipping and inventory clerks and even human resources specialists. Ultimately it's all about unifying skills that employees already had, and employers sought out, but may have been describing in different ways. 'Why should their skills not be the currency for growth they have ahead?' asks Morris.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Job Market Is Frozen
Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around. Only they didn't. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother's. 'It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,' one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May. As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard? The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren't searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. 'I don't want to say this kind of thing has never happened,' Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. 'But I've certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.' Call it the Big Freeze. [Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy] The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself. The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. 'It's hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,' Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. 'No one wanted to go through anything like it again.' Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones. Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America's economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees. Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. 'The most common thing I hear from employers is 'We can't move forward if we don't know where the world is going to be in six months,'' Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. 'Survive Until '25' became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country. By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged. Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The 'professional and business services' sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.) [David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war] A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn't change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest. For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers' confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling 'stuck' in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions. This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. 'This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,' Pollak told me. 'A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.' According to economists and executives, the labor market won't thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump's presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place. Article originally published at The Atlantic
