Job seekers are sour on the cooling labor market

Workers are souring on the state of the job market.

Job seeker confidence in Q2 2024 fell to its lowest level in more than two years, according to a quarterly survey by ZipRecruiter, which has tracked the metric since Q1 2022. That decline suggests workers are more pessimistic about their ability to land their preferred jobs.

Workers had reason for euphoria two to three years ago: The job market was red-hot and, by many metrics, historically strong.

It has remained remarkably resilient even in the face of an aggressive interest-rate-hiking campaign by U.S. Federal Reserve to tame high inflation.

However, the labor market has slowed gradually. Workers are now having a harder time finding jobs and the labor market, while still solid, could be in trouble if it continues to cool, economists said.

“There actually now is reason in the data to understand why job seekers are feeling kind of gloomy,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “The labor market really is deteriorating and jobseekers are noticing.”

Demand for workers surged in 2021 as Covid-19 vaccines rolled out and the U.S. economy reopened broadly.

Job openings hit record highs, giving workers ample choice. Businesses competed for talent by raising wages quickly. By January 2023, the unemployment rate touched 3.4%, its lowest level since 1969.

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Workers were able to quit their jobs readily for better, higher-paying ones, a period that came to be known as the great resignation or the great reshuffling. More than 50 million people quit in 2022, a record high.

The U.S. economy was able to avoid the recession that many economists had predicted even as inflation declined significantly. However, many Americans still felt downbeat on the economy, a so-called “vibecession” — a sentiment that persists despite the overall economy’s relative strength.

Many job metrics have fallen back to their rough pre-pandemic levels, however. The rate of hiring by employers is at its lowest since 2017.

“The postpandemic excesses of the U.S. job market have largely subsided,” Preston Caldwell, senior U.S. economist for Morningstar Research Services, recently wrote.

The unemployment rate has also ticked up to 4.1% as of June 2024. While that rate is “consistent with a strong labor market,” its steady rise is the “troubling factor,” Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in early July.

The labor market’s broad readjustment has been “mostly welcome” as it comes back into its pre-pandemic balance, Bunker said. But any further cooling “is a riskier proposition,” he said.

“For now, the labor market remains robust, but the future is uncertain,” he wrote in early July after the federal government’s latest batch of monthly jobs data. “Today’s report shows the temperature of the labor market is still pleasant, but if current trends continue the weather could get uncomfortably cold.”

Worker sentiment could rebound if and when the Fed starts cutting interest rates, which could help households by reducing borrowing costs, Pollak said.

“People seize on good news and get very excited,” she said.