Qualified candidates struggle in a sluggish market due to Trump tariffs, AI screening and vanishing entry-level roles***
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced on Tuesday that the US added 911,000 fewer jobs than first estimated for the year to March 2025, highlighting already heightened concerns about the health of the labor market.
The news followed a lackluster August jobs report, with only 22,000 jobs added in the US. That report noted that 13,000 jobs were lost for the month of June 2025, the first negative jobs report survey since December 2020, the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, the highest rate since 2021.
Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of labor statistics, was fired by Trump after a weak job’s report in July, which the president claimed, without evidence, was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.
It’s true. It’s really, really bad. Linked in is (my estimate) about 50% jobs-that-don’t-exist-they’re-just-collecting-resumes-to-replace-the-current-people-with-lower-priced-ones and straight up scams (pro tip, always speak to a human on the phone at some point before giving any serious information.)
Secondly, you have to use a tool that matches your resume to the job posting and changes all the words to match the posting exactly. For example, if you have CI/CD as a skill and the job posting using CICD, you have to change your resume. Or sometimes they’ll spell it out so then you have to spell it out.
Which is such utter bullshit because you have to spend time adjusting your resume for every fucking job posting just to get past a fucking machine so hopefully a human sees it.
That doesn’t really affect me because I wouldn’t want those jobs anyways. If they are using AI to screen resumes, I straight up do not want to work there unless they are paying double the industry average, and they aren’t. I will take a few more weeks unemployed than bother with AI in ANY capacity.
True, until you’re unemployed and strapped for cash
Still don’t want those jobs. Now I just do crimes.
Its sorta funny because it should be the opposite. They should be actively looking through the publicly posted resumes who list as seeking work. You should not even need to apply as your resume is posted publicly on the site. It cracks me up that anyone has faith in ai when something like job seekers and available jobs are not easily tackled by it.
I don’t know of anyone with “faith” in AI. I know a lot of dumbass “leaders” who are forcing their unwilling teams to use it for - reasons.
maybe faith is the wrong word. There are just a lot of things that require a bunch of work and theoretically a savy digital system could do wonders but the fact it does not just shows it can’t really do much. You would think a bit of “prompt engineering” using linkedin information would quickly (within a day) be able to get down to a dozen very good candidates.
Well one thing it can’t do very well is parse pdfs. Bullet lists are also difficult. There’s just limitations to text prediction masquerading as intelligence of some sort.
Which is really sorta amazing. Parsing a more orderly kind of text.