US labor market stuck in 'low-hiring, low-firing' cycle for years

Job seeker's story lays bare the deep freeze gripping the labor market

Not directly related to this article. [Getty Images Bank]
Not directly related to this article. [Getty Images Bank]

The story of a man who earned a doctorate from Princeton University and spent two years applying to more than 2,300 positions without landing a job has been featured in the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal reported Saturday (local time) on Jack Weiss, 30, a Salt Lake City, Utah native living with his parents at the family home. Weiss graduated summa cum laude from Rice University before entering Princeton's doctoral program in 2018, where he researched chemical principles and molecular interactions.

His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel Committee when it announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics as an example of the scientific application of machine learning.

Weiss initially sent out a flood of applications targeting research positions at pharmaceutical companies and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories, but most went unanswered — with only the occasional rejection notice arriving in return.

He broadened his search across industries and regions, yet frequently could not even secure an interview. He eventually applied for a food preparation role at a company that sells frozen crab cakes, and never heard back at all.

Hoping his alumni network might help, he reached out by phone to graduates of both Princeton and Rice, but ultimately got little more than advice to check the companies' job postings online.

In January this year, he took a part-time gig at a startup that trains AI professionals, earning $70 an hour.

At first his hours varied — sometimes 20 a week, sometimes as few as four — but idle days grew more frequent, stretching into weeks with no work at all. In mid-March, he learned his contract had been terminated through a group chat message.

Weiss is now weighing law school and has signed up to take the entrance exam in November. He is also pursuing a startup venture, designing drones that use AI to remove invasive weeds.

His parents, both physicians, remain shaken by their son's struggle to find work.

His mother, Holly Carvers, reviewed his application materials looking for anything that might give an employer pause but found nothing — the applications appeared well written. "It's really unexpected. I don't know how to make sense of this situation," she said.

His father, John Weiss, said, "I never in my wildest dreams thought this kid would have trouble."

Lindsey Ellis, the Journal reporter who wrote the piece, said her first interview with Weiss took place at the end of last year, just before his 30th birthday. "I wanted to meet job seekers in all 50 US states," she said.

"Even after interviewing dozens of people across all 50 states, Weiss's story particularly stayed with me," she wrote, "because his experience laid bare the deep freeze that has paralyzed the labor market over the past few years."

She described the current US job market as what economists call a "low-hiring, low-firing" environment. "Many people have jobs but aren't leaving them, which limits opportunities for others. Those without jobs feel as if they've been locked outside a fortress, unable to enter a growing economy," she said.

Recent US employment reports have fallen well short of market expectations, according to the Journal.

The unemployment rate remains low, but the share of the unemployed out of work for 27 weeks or more reached its highest level in about a decade this past summer, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic period and its immediate aftermath.

A Gallup survey in August found that only 34 percent of Americans said it was a good time to find a quality job.

A Pew Research Center survey released last month found that more than 70 percent of American respondents expected AI to reduce the overall number of jobs.

Some data also show that the unemployment rate among college graduates has surpassed that of non-graduates. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, said the unemployment rate among college-educated New Yorkers aged 22 to 27 stood at 7.3 percent as of March.

Among the same age group without a college education, the unemployment rate was 7.1 percent — the first time the rate for college graduates has exceeded that of non-graduates since January 2011. Back then, the unemployment rate for young people without a college degree was 13.6 percent, nearly double the 7.3 percent recorded for graduates.

Lander said the trend "may be another signal that AI is already affecting employment in New York," and called for closer attention to the worsening job prospects for college graduates relative to their non-graduate peers.


jiyun@heraldcorp.com