The Job Market Battleground

The only way to win is to choose not to participate

There is a battle taking place in the US job market today. Employers complain they can’t find anyone to hire and no one wants to work. Job seekers have multiple complaints: remote positions are hard to find; low pay; can’t get interviews or they get ghosted after the first one. There are 10 million unfilled jobs and unemployment remains at record lows. The job search process is broken.

The job search process is broken.

The average job search length has also — no surprise — increased since the pandemic. Pre-covid the typical job posting on LinkedIn received 300–400 applications. Today it’s upwards of 1,000. The more senior the role, the longer the search takes; vp-level searches often exceed 12 months, and that’s when you know someone who can help to get you an interview. With some companies, you can spend months just getting through their interview process.

No doubt the addition of AI will create new challenges on both sides of the job search process. Employers have used applicant tracking software for years to search resumes for key words and weed out the unqualified. Now there are AI-driven options that can tweak a resume to match the job description with a couple of commands, reducing resume-tweaking time to seconds. Both seekers and employers will have to up their AI skills to stay in the game.

Both seekers and employers will have to up their AI skills to stay in the game.

While all that has been going on, job tenures have gotten shorter. This is especially true for director-level and above. In some cases, it’s less than two years. So even if you land that dream job, you still have to constantly network to line up the next job because this one won’t last.

Employment options have changed as well. Now there are several viable options:

1. Full-time

2. Part-time

3. Interim

4. Fractional (lots of growth here, especially at the senior-level)

5. Project-based/consultant

Whether the options outside full-time are a good thing or not depends on what you’re looking for. For those who want a steady income and long-term job security…well, good luck. I haven’t even mentioned layoffs. Just staying employed is now a full-time job.

Just staying employed is now a full-time job.

If you’re over 50, all of this is exponentially more challenging. Despite the claimed shortage of qualified workers, there is an entire generation being pushed out of the market by employers who deem them too old, too expensive, or out of touch with technology.

Just thinking about a job search is exhausting. You might be able to get a recruiter; one estimate is there are more than three million of them out there. But finding a good one isn’t easy, and if you do, getting them to help you is almost as hard as the job search.

It’s no wonder that more and more people are thinking about being their own boss. Building their dream instead of someone else’s. Creating a stable future with greater flexibility and control instead of jumping from one job to another. Most of all, not having to wonder how long this job will last and when the next search will start.

Of course, the idea of starting a business is plenty daunting itself. We all know how to look for a job, but start a business? Is it even the right move? Where do I start?