Why is it so hard to find a job right now, if layoffs are so low?

The short version

• What’s happening: Employers in the US are letting few people go, but they are also hiring slowly, and workers are quitting far less often than at the 2021 to 2022 peak. In the UK, vacancies have dropped to their lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014.
• Why now: New official figures came out on 20 October (UK) and on 3 and 6 November 2026 (US). October's US job gain looked stronger, and September's hires and quits rates are slightly above July's, but hiring is still below its long-run average.
• Should you care: If your search is taking a long time, the market is part of the reason. Knowing which numbers matter also helps you read the next jobs headline calmly.

Why is it so hard to find a job right now? Mostly because employers are neither firing nor hiring much, and workers are quitting far less often than at the 2021 to 2022 peak, which leaves fewer roles for others to fill. So if your search feels stuck, the figures back you up. They describe a slow market, and they can’t judge you.

Why is it so hard to find a job right now if few people are losing theirs?

Low layoffs sound like good news, and for people in work they are. For people looking, the number that counts is how many employers are adding someone new.

In the US, that number is subdued. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September 2026 figures, published on 3 November, put the three key flows here:

A hires rate of 3.4% looks close to the 3.7% average since December 2000, as given by the Richmond Fed. On a workforce this size, though, that gap works out at roughly 480,000 fewer hires in a month (our sum).

Does this describe your search? The slowdown is likely to weigh most heavily if any of these apply:

• You are starting out, or coming back after time away from work.
• You have been looking for several months.
• You are seeing fewer postings in your sector than you did a year or two ago.

What does “low-hire, low-fire” mean?

It means a market where employers are cautious in both directions. They hold on to the staff they have, and they are slow to add more.

Each half has happened before. The Richmond Fed researchers call July’s 3.2% hires rate below average but not unprecedented, with about 7% of readings since late 2000 coming in lower. July’s 1.0% layoff rate was rarer: only about 4% of readings were lower.

The odd part is the pairing. Their combined hiring measure, built from several indicators, has sat in the weaker half of its history for more than two years. Separations, meanwhile, are close to the lowest on record.

They also found no sign on the firing side of the build-up seen before the Great Recession. That is one reason not to read this as a countdown to a crash, though it isn’t a forecast.

A low-fire market protects people who have a job. It does little for people looking for one.

How can the jobs numbers look fine when job hunting feels awful?

Headline job growth is a net figure: people joining payrolls minus people leaving. It can stay positive while very little is moving.

September shows how this works. About 5.4 million people were hired and about 5.3 million left, so two huge flows nearly cancelled out. The separate payroll survey now puts that month’s gain at 60,000, revised up from 29,000.

October’s headline looks better: a gain of 165,000, with unemployment at 4.1%. That’s welcome, but it doesn’t yet tell you how much hiring went on. The October hires figure isn’t due until 1 December.

Earlier in the year the headline looked healthier. Indeed’s Hiring Lab noted in June an average gain of 114,000 jobs a month from January to May 2026, since revised to about 86,000 (our sum from BLS data), while April’s hires rate was close to its weakest since 2013. Separations had dropped even further, which is why the sum stayed positive. Its analysis described those gains as “less a sign of strength than one of stillness”.

What to do with this: when you see a jobs headline, look for the hires rate as well. It tells you far more about your chances of being taken on than the net figure does.

Why does it matter that people are quitting less than they did?

Quits are usually the larger part of people leaving: about 3.4 million in September, around twice the number of layoffs. Each one tends to leave a gap.

This next part is our reasoning, not a statistic. When someone leaves for a new role, their old role opens up. Whoever fills it may leave a gap of their own, and so on down the line. Many openings are created this way, because someone else moved first.

So when people stay put, the chain shortens. Fewer moves at the top means fewer openings further down, and those at the end of the line, often newcomers, feel it most. Staying in a job you might otherwise leave has picked up a nickname, “job hugging”.

This has deep roots. A Cleveland Fed commentary argues that hiring and separations have been trending down since at least the mid-1990s. Perhaps half of that long fall reflects demographics such as ageing and education, and the rest isn’t well understood.

There is some better news. US quits rose by 375,000 over the year to September, and the 2.1% rate is well below its 3.0% peak of 2021 and 2022 but slightly above its average of about 2.0% since December 2000 (our sum). So the chain may be loosening slightly. One month can mislead, though, and these figures get revised.

Why are there so many applicants for every job?

Fewer openings is only half of it. LinkedIn says applicants for open roles have doubled since spring 2022, and that the UK figure has more than doubled.

Treat that with care. It comes from one platform, and we couldn’t find its method published in the reports we read. A count of applications also isn’t a count of serious rivals, because one person can apply to many roles, and online that takes little effort.

How to read the silence: it tells you less than it feels like it does, because it can simply reflect the volume on the other side. Nobody can promise how one application will land.

Is AI taking the jobs?

It’s unresolved. The evidence points to a possible effect on one group, and no sign of a broad wipeout.

One widely discussed study comes from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, using ADP payroll data. As of June 2026, employment of 22 to 25-year-olds in the jobs most exposed to AI stood about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with peers in less-exposed work. Experienced workers showed no comparable gap, and the authors say they see no widespread displacement.

Importantly, they say these patterns aren’t causal estimates. They add their own cautions: the gaps shrink once education is accounted for, some trends began before generative AI, and national surveys show smaller gaps than their payroll data.

So AI may be part of the story for some early-career roles. It can’t be separated cleanly from the wider slowdown yet.

Who is finding it hardest?

People trying to get in. That follows from the mechanics: if few people are being laid off, a large share of those out of work are newcomers or returners, and they rely entirely on hiring.

In October 2026, 32.8% of unemployed people were re-entrants and 11.1% were new entrants, about 44% together. The agency has no October 2025 figure to compare, but the share was about 42% in September 2025.

For graduates, the picture is mixed:

• Unemployment: the New York Fed puts recent graduates aged 22 to 27 at 5.2% in the third quarter of 2026, its lowest in more than a year.
• Underemployment: 42.5% of them were in jobs that don’t typically need a degree, a slight rise.
• Longer trend: the St. Louis Fed reported in June that the share of recent graduates in work had fallen 3.2 percentage points nationally since April 2023.

Long searches are common too. In the October jobs report, 2.0 million Americans, 27.6% of the unemployed, had been out of work for 27 weeks or more. If that’s you, you are in a large group.

Is it the same in the UK?

It’s similar in feel, but the shape differs. The newest ONS release, from 20 October 2026, shows the squeeze mainly through vacancies:

• Vacancies are estimated at 691,000 for July to September 2026, down 37,000 (5.1%) on the year.
• That’s the first reading under 700,000 since early 2021. Outside the pandemic, you’d have to go back to 2014 to find as few.
• The ratio of unemployed people to vacancies was 2.4 in June to August, a little better than 2.5 in March to May.
• Vacancies fell on the year in 13 of 18 sectors. Professional, scientific and technical work lost the most (down 9,000).

Redundancies are not unusually high. At 3.8 per 1,000 employees in June to August 2026, the rate matches the 2019 average and is below the 4.9 recorded in the last quarter of 2025.

But payrolled employees fell by 111,000 in the year to August, so the UK looks less still than the US. Signals are mixed, though: the survey-based employment rate edged up to 75.3%.

The two countries define and collect these numbers differently, so read them as rough. The ONS vacancy estimate also carries a margin of about 32,000 either way, so small moves may not be real.

We can’t yet set UK hires and quits beside the US figures. The ONS has experimental data on hires, separations and job moves provisionally due on 23 November 2026, which should help.

When will the job market get better?

We won’t forecast it, and any confident date deserves suspicion. Economists debate the wider causes of the slowdown, and this piece sticks to what the data shows. Here is what we would count as improvement:

The latest moves are mildly encouraging, though noisy. The US hires rate rose from 3.2% in July to 3.4% in September, but it has swung between 3.1% and 3.5% this year, and the Richmond Fed’s hiring measure rose from the 36th to the 43rd percentile between July and August. Those are small moves, and they could reverse.

A full return to the churn of earlier decades looks unlikely soon, because the Cleveland Fed commentary points to an ageing population as a reason that movement may not fully rebound. Better, in other words, may look like a slow thaw rather than a sudden flood of openings.

What to do with this: check the vacancy figures for your own sector in the ONS tables, or the industry figures in the US release, since the national average can hide a lot. You can’t control any of these numbers, but you can stop reading them as a verdict on you.

Our take

This is a market that protects people in work and does far less for people trying to get in. That is hard to live through, and it is easy to take personally. The figures can't explain any one rejection, but they do show the door is narrower for most people trying to get through it. We think the number to watch is hiring, because headline job gains can hide how little movement there is.

Common questions

What does low-hire, low-fire mean?

It describes a job market where employers make few new hires and also let few people go. People in work are fairly secure, while people looking for work face fewer openings than usual and slower decisions.

Why is the job market so bad, and when will it get better?

Slow hiring and low worker movement are the main visible reasons, and economists debate the wider causes. Nobody can give a reliable date. In the US, watch the monthly hires and quits rates. In the UK, watch vacancies and unemployed people per vacancy.

Is it harder to find a job with a degree?

A degree does not shield new graduates from slow hiring. In the third quarter of 2026, New York Fed figures put US recent graduate unemployment at 5.2% and underemployment at 42.5%. Those figures alone don't show that graduates have it harder than non-graduates.

What is job hugging?

Job hugging is an informal term for staying in your current job, even if you might otherwise leave, because moving feels uncertain. It isn't an official statistic. The closest measure is the quits rate.

Is it just me, or is everyone struggling to find a job?

Official figures show a slow market in both the US and the UK, so a long search is common. They can't tell you about your own applications, and they don't show how any one person's search will go.

Sources

1. FRED: Quits rate, total nonfarm (JTSQUR)
2. FRED: Hires rate, total nonfarm (JTSHIR)
3. FRED: All employees, total nonfarm (PAYEMS)
4. US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, September 2026
5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics: JOLTS technical note
6. US Bureau of Labor Statistics: The Employment Situation, October 2026
7. US Bureau of Labor Statistics: The Employment Situation, September 2026
8. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond: Visualizing the Low-Hire, Low-Fire Labor Market
9. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland: The Low-Hire, Low-Fire Labor Market
10. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: It's (Still) the Business Cycle
11. Federal Reserve Bank of New York: The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
12. Indeed Hiring Lab: Strong Job Gains, Weak Hiring
13. Stanford Digital Economy Lab: No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19%
14. ONS: Vacancies and jobs in the UK, October 2026
15. ONS: UK labour market, October 2026
16. ONS: Redundancy rate time series (BEIR)
17. ONS: Insights on UK labour market dynamism (release notice)
18. Fortune: LinkedIn survey on hiring, 7 January 2026
19. City AM: UK job applicants double amid AI-driven squeeze, 9 January 2026

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