Why is it so hard to find a job right now?

• Many say finding a job is difficult, even though unemployment and layoffs are low in the US.
• The job market is in a "holding pattern," an economist told Business Insider.
• To break out of it, employers will need to feel more confident the economy can dodge a recession.

Lynne Vargas calls it ghost hiring.

Vargas, a special education instructor, has been mired for months in various stages of interviews for three teaching jobs. The processes have dragged on so long that sometimes she wonders whether the roles are real. With one position, she waited three months after an interview. Then she got fed up.

"So I call them and I'm like, 'Do you need someone for this year for this position?'" Vargas, 55, told Business Insider. "It was ridiculous."

Vargas, who lives in Middletown, New York, isn't alone in her frustration. Even though the US unemployment rate is near the lowest level in decades and overall layoffs remain modest, employers are, on average, taking longer to hire, and some are posting fewer jobs than not long ago. That's making some job hunts harder. It's a head-spinning shift from a couple of years ago when people looking for work had the upper hand.

The slowest hiring in a decade

Aside from the depths of the pandemic lockdowns, US employers are extending job offers at the lowest level since 2014, Daniel Zhao, a lead economist at Glassdoor, told BI. That sluggish hiring a decade ago was when the US was still clawing its way out of the global financial crisis — hardly like the robust job market that prevails today.

So what gives?

Employers are still concerned about the economy despite current data. Hiring is unlikely to bounce back sustainably until managers are confident inflation is under control and the Federal Reserve can roll back interest rates, Cory Stahle, an economist with Indeed, told BI.

Employers' hiring rate fell sharply in 2023, Zhao said. And workers are quitting less. That means fewer people are moving around.

"It feels like the job market is in a bit of a holding pattern," Zhao said recently.

The time it takes to bring on a worker rose to 44.5 days in 2023 from 40 in 2019, according to Josh Bersin Research, which provides HR data. The average, based on surveys of several thousand companies, is continuing to climb.

To be sure, employers in areas like healthcare and retail are keen to hire, Debbie Lovich, a managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, told BI. Many people who have or are looking for a job in those areas still hold sway, she said.

Yet outside hot sectors, many employers are more focused on actions like cost-cutting than hiring, Lovich said

All this hiring hesitation — or difficulty finding the workers companies need — can mean some job searches are punctuated by round after round of interviews like Vargas has experienced. It can also make job seekers feel like they just have to keep applying.

Guess how many jobs I've applied for

Royal Siu, who lives in Seattle and is trained as a pharmacist, likes to make his friends guess how many jobs he's applied to. They'll often toss out some number around 40, he told BI. He'll tell them to keep going. Most give up by the time they reach 100. That's when Siu drops that he's applied to about 300 jobs. "It's usually a shock factor to them," he said.

Siu, who's trying to use his pharmacy degree to work in other parts of healthcare, is finding it harder to land interviews than in a prior job search. The 28-year-old was getting more phone screenings and first and second interviews in the past. This time, it's been a couple of months since he had a screening call. So he continues to turn to his network but also doesn't stop applying.

"When I'm looking down my list, it's like a lot of pending, a lot of rejections," Siu, who keeps a spreadsheet, said. It's very much "a numbers game."

Hitting the numbers on job applications is also a priority for Kevin Cash, who previously told BI he's applied to more than 1,200 jobs and has mostly been ghosted. The 42-year-old Navy veteran with an MBA has been looking for a full-time role since he was laid off in November 2022.

They're not alone in not hearing back. Mentions of "ghosting" were up 13% in January from a year earlier on interview reviews on Glassdoor, the company said. And references to the term are up 77% from February 2020, just before pandemic shutdowns in the US.

For some workers, a sluggish-feeling job market isn't anything new. Jeff Calnan, who got a full-time job with the US Air Force focusing on contracting work in July, told BI his nine-month search wasn't easy — but it wasn't as bad as when the dot-com bubble burst, throwing him out of work in 1999. That time, his hunt lasted 13 months.

For this latest search, Calnan, who is 65 and lives in Woburn, Massachusetts, said he applied to some 750 jobs and tried to hit up contacts who knew his skills and work ethic.

Employers want a sense of direction

While wage gains have helped fuel inflation in the last couple of years, pay increases are now cooling, which might make it somewhat easier for employers to bring on more people, Indeed's Stahle said.

And there appears to be "cautious optimism" that inflation will moderate and the Fed will cut rates this year, he said. The latest US jobs report also showed stronger-than-expected job gains in January.

Stahle compared the current wait-and-see stance to watching a football game: "We keep saying, 'Man, the comeback is possible. The comeback is possible.'"

In the meantime, workers like Vargas feel stuck. She's accepted a part-time job and plans to teach private classes for students learning English as a second language.

"The fruitless interviews are disenchanting," Vargas said.