Off the sidelines and into the low-hire economy

Aside from a one-month pandemic plunge in April 2020, the U.S. hiring rate is scraping its lowest depths since 2013. Yet in the third quarter of 2025, more than 6 million Americans resumed looking for a job (technically, moved from “not in the labor force” status into unemployment). That’s a 9 percent increase from the prior quarter.

As the labor market stagnates, something notable is happening: More Americans are getting back in the game (Figure 1).

In recent months, the flow of people out of unemployment and into jobs has not kept pace, contributing to the rising unemployment rate.

This stream of fresh labor supply into today’s “low-hire, low-fire” job market looks likely to increase. For every person who actually restarts their job hunt each month, roughly three more Americans say they want to do so (Figure 2). And this Labor Department tally of people who are not yet actively searching but “want a job now” has been rising.

This “want a job now” statistic is at its highest level since 2021. Back then, the reading coincided with opportunity and optimism: The U.S. job market had the fastest hiring rate in more than 20 years, and wage pressures were building, especially for lower-paid jobs.

Today’s entrants are not tempted by a red-hot labor market. This time, many are searching again because they have to.¹

“Mom better start transitioning”

As excess post-pandemic savings have run out, household mortgage and consumer debt burdens have risen again to near pre-pandemic levels. Credit card delinquencies are at the highest point in 13 years. Life is simply more expensive; the overall price level has risen 25 percent since COVID, with some of the steepest increases for household necessities like groceries and housing (both up 29 percent).

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Noack

“All financial burdens are placed squarely on my shoulders,” said Jennifer Noack of St. Paul, who is a single mom after a divorce. Her youngest child is 17; an older son has a disability. Both kids “are transitioning to their next stage in life,” Noack said, “and mom better start transitioning to her next stage in life—which means I need to learn to support myself.”

Noack, a skilled typist, is midstream in a series of training courses for office administration, with support from a local nonprofit. But she has ventured some applications along the way—and received a taste of what lies ahead.

“There’s these programs now that filter the résumés and look for certain words, and you have to try to navigate that,” she said. “It’s really daunting, to be quite honest.” She received interviews for entry-level bank teller positions that she considered easy to land. “I think I did really well. They seemed to be happy with my performance. But they were completely, ‘Nope, we went with someone else.’”

Another harsh surprise for someone reentering today’s job market: “The whole idea of having to make connections to get a job,” Noack said. Her network is admittedly thin after many years raising her children. “It seems like who you know is as important as your skills. And that’s a little depressing to me.”

Job market “the ugliest I’ve seen”

The headline unemployment rate remains an enigmatic indicator—a mix of stagnant hiring, the still-modest pace of layoffs, and changes to the immigrant workforce. Within the population of unemployed, however, a trend stands out: The proportion experiencing long-term unemployment—job searching for at least 27 weeks—is creeping up and now sits at around a quarter of all unemployed people (Figure 3).

Hiring prospects vary greatly across industries and roles, especially in the rare bright spots like health care. But people reentering the labor force may be especially at risk of long-term unemployment. They are stepping into a job market that “is the ugliest I’ve seen,” said Erik Larson, a career counselor at Minnesota-based Avivo for 25 years—a time period that includes the Great Recession and its historically slow recovery.

Larson says reentrants vary from new parents who only intended a short break to older people exiting Social Security disability status who have been away from work for years. For most, the job-counseling process “is kind of a tightrope walk,” Larson said. “It’s a lot of acts of diplomacy—being supportive while being realistic.”

This is especially true for older workers, Larson said, even those with extensive experience. “There are some talented folks coming in, but they’ve got such competition,” Larson said. “They’re going to six in-person interviews, they’re getting walk-throughs to meet a couple of different VPs—and then they don’t hear a darn thing from the employer whatsoever. People are feeling pretty put out.”

Larson says part of his role is “getting people away from sitting in their basement and applying over and over and over.” Networking is the unfortunate reality when “you are in the boat with a lot of folks,” he said. “It is not only going to help you find work and at least get you kind of in the mix. It’s also going to give you social support that’s going to help your spirit while you’re in this really major transition.”

Deeper trends: More men are working again, and more women than ever

Today’s trends unfold atop long-term changes in labor force participation (LFP), a statistic that includes anyone who is employed or unemployed (and actively searching, by definition). Seen through this wider lens, who has been going back to work? It looks like almost everyone except older Americans, whose participation dropped steeply at the pandemic and continues to fall.

Despite the moribund hiring market, LFP has continued to reverse long-term declines for some key demographic groups. Participation by prime-working-age men has been mostly falling since at least 1955 (as long as the modern statistic has been kept). But the period since the pandemic resumed the modest rebound that began in the mid-2010s. Participation since the pandemic by Black men exhibits an even stronger upward trend (Figure 4).

At the same time, more women are feeding into the labor market supply. After declining from 2000 to 2015, prime-age female LFP climbed to record levels in 2024 and remains there. (Participation by Black women is the exception, declining since late 2023.)

In many circumstances, growing LFP is a positive economic development; under low-hire conditions, it could be a mixed blessing. If companies remain reluctant to add jobs—or begin to deliver on projections that artificial intelligence could replace tens of millions of jobs in a short period—the desire by more people to participate in the labor force could contribute to a larger unemployment rate and an even more intense battle for limited openings.

Training programs could also feel the pressure. Job market reentrant Jennifer Noack credits the Minnesota Family Resiliency Partnership—known for many years as the “displaced homemaker program”—as her lifeline back to the working work. “I treat it like a job from 8:30 to 11:30,” four days a week, Noack said. “I have this huge gap but still I have a lot of skills I developed … while I was being a stay-at-home mom. They’re not the kind I can produce a certificate for, but … the classes have given me a lot of confidence.”

Right now, Noack still sees empty seats around her. The latest labor market data suggest they might not sit empty for long.

Endnotes

1 The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics characterizes these survey respondents (people not in the labor force but who “want a job now”) as “marginally attached” if they have searched within the past 12 months but not in the last four weeks. While this subgroup is growing, most of the recent growth comes from the larger proportion who say they want a job now and have not searched for at least a year.