To all my friends who feel like they aren't good enough to get a job right now: it's not you. Alternative economic metrics suggest a bifurcation of the job market, with higher-earning jobs hiring less and more slowly.
"But among those who make more than $96,000? ... Hiring has slowed to a dismal 0.5%, less than half the peak it reached in mid-2022. Excluding the dip in the early months of the pandemic, that's the worst it's been since 2014."
The article hits on a phenomenon I observed at my last company:
"...says Fiona Greig, the global head of investor research and policy at Vanguard, 'pulling back on expensive workers will reduce costs to a greater extent than pulling back on your lower-income workers.' Translation: The more you earn when budgets are tight, the less an employer wants to hire you."
"the big stay" / "the trapped in place economy" is the result
I'm still working though this article. While the bottom-third v. top-third graph is telling, the values are correlated over time.
Something really telling is the Vanguard hires vs. JOLTS hires, which reverse direction during the Mar-Apr 2020 recession.
Companies were adding workers with no 401(k) while pulling back on workers who would have gotten a 401(k).
Patrick Cherry