The Maitlands find a book in their house, “Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” but it’s written in such thick jargon they don’t understand a word of it. In the underworld, when they ask questions, people roll their eyes and say they should have studied the manual harder, telling them things like, “It’s all in the handbook!” and “The intermediate interface chapter on haunting says it all.”
Looking for a job in 2026 is a version of this purgatory.
Nena Caviness, 46, who works in manufacturing and retail, has been looking for a job for six months. She uses artificial intelligence to sharpen her résumé and find the best fitting roles, and says she has sent in over 200 applications. She has made it to the interview stage a few times, and each time it involves an arduous set of take-home assignments and in-person interviews. “I can run a flawless process, prepare for 40 hours, perform well across multiple panels, reach the final round three separate times and still end with nothing. ” Caviness said.
Caviness’s experience is not unique, and the description that kept coming up among both the job seekers and economists I spoke to was: strange. Having the economy in a low-fire, low-hire equilibrium “is actually pretty unusual,” said Erika McEntarfer, a research scholar and a distinguished policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, who affirmed my waiting room analogy. “I can’t recall a recent precedent.”
This strange and unusual job market is the result of a confluence of technological and political forces: A.I. kneecapping entry-level jobs, continuing tariff chaos and uncertainty around trade policy, federal funding cuts and the Iran War pushing up oil prices at the beginning of the year. (McEntarfer herself has been a victim of our chaotic and vindictive administration.) We don’t even know how to measure the full impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market yet, as my newsroom colleague Ben Casselman explained earlier this week, “Researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like how many companies are using A.I. or which workers are most vulnerable to the disruptions it could cause.”
The unknown unknowns about A.I. may be making employers gun-shy about creating new roles, or hiring to replace the wave of boomers who are retiring, said Cristian deRitis, a managing director and deputy chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Artificial intelligence makes posting roles very easy for employers, which can lend the impression a business is thriving, he explained: “It’s costless to post openings everywhere and just kind of see what happens. If there’s a great candidate that all of a sudden shows up in your doorstep, maybe you advance it.” But maybe they don’t.
