Job Market is AWFUL in 2024... When Will it Get Better?

So the TikToks that I made just got me fired. This dude applied to 1,414 jobs over the past year. Not a single acceptance. How many months could you survive without cash compensation for the right opportunity? All right, so with the recent jobs report coming out the day that I'm recording this video, I thought we should go back and take a look at the job market again and the absolute dumpster fire it is. It seems like nobody's getting hired right out of college. They want years of experience. However, if you have too much experience, they're not going to hire you because they'd rather lowball somebody who's younger and desperate for a job, even though they don't really want to hire them either. Like, honestly, what's happening here? It's just an absolute mess. So we have some clips to go over along with some of your comments from previous videos. So if you want to be featured on a future video, leave it in the comments down below. And I did start a second channel where I upload just as frequently as this channel. It's a bit shorter form content, along with some topics you wouldn't normally see on this channel. So if you want to check that out, but we're just going to get into the last two months of job reports because it's ridiculous. This is coming straight from the U.S. Government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS. For the month of September, the U.S. economy added a net 254,000 jobs. The unemployment rate has now improved from 4.2% to 4.1%. These results have blown away expectations. The newest jobs report was just released, and this is coming from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it was the worst reports in four years. The U.S. economy added just 12,000 jobs in the month of October. But as I told you two days ago, it would be affected by the hurricanes and the Boeing strike. But still, I mean, I told you about that. I told you to take that into consideration. But 12,000 jobs added. That is awful. So over the past several months, we've seen unemployment creep up pretty quickly. And magically, two months ago, a quarter of a million jobs were created in a single month, absolutely destroying expectations and made it look like the economy was great. And now we have the most recent data that had just about 10,000 jobs instead of the quarter million that they had the month before. Now it just goes to show that you can't really take this data seriously because it almost always gets downward revised. I've seen several different numbers with that quarter million just from two months ago. Now it's down to about 223,000 is what I saw and just the 12,000 in the last 30 days. It does really seem that it was manipulated. And two months ago, the job market exploded to calm everybody down. Now some people say it was political because the election is right around the corner, but other people say it was just to calm down the public and the outcry for how bad the job market has become. And then as soon as everybody's attention is basically turned to the election because it's only a couple days from now, they come out with a jobs market that is the worst they've seen in years. But nobody's really paying attention. Everybody's just looking at Trump versus Harris. But it doesn't really matter what side of the political spectrum you're on. The job market just looks like an absolute circus right now. We have a comment from one of you guys. I'm a former military aerospace engineer with a security clearance. I used to sneeze and get a job offer. These days, I can't even get an interview. There is nothing out there. And this has just become more and more common over the past few years because my generation was told that if you are going to go to college, don't get a liberal arts degree. You need to get something more specialized or like the CS degrees, business degrees, something along the lines of that. However, it seems like everybody has started to get those as well. So when everybody ends up having these same degrees, you start seeing stories like this. I'm out here waiting for a job interview like it's a call center. Look at this. I am number 79 with 11 active interviewers. This is insane. I've never seen this in my life. Here's an update. I started at 230. Right now, it's 444. I'm still waiting for the interview. Hours later, after waiting for this interview, I check my email. We will not be proceeding with your application. Are you kidding me? Hi, my name's Amy, and I'm on day 151 of the longest job hunt of my life. Currently at a 4% interview rate. That's heinous. Accidentally became a LinkedIn influencer in the process, and I still haven't gotten a goddamn job. This is a pain in my ass. I hate it. Every day is the same. I've been ghosted after like six interviews with big companies, but I can't even put them on blast here because I still need a job. Yo, we are actually doomed. This dude applied to 1,414 jobs over the past year. Not a single acceptance. To make it worse, he literally says that he has 10 years of experience. Holy fuck. I don't know what is going on here, but the market is in absolute shambles. So what it seems like to me, you have to be the absolute perfect candidate for any one of these jobs now. You can't have just come out of college where you only have maybe internship experience at best, and you can't be somebody in their 40s and 50s who have been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years where you have so much experience, you could demand more money. You have to be in the middle of that and still be lowballed into oblivion because it's an employer's market still. I mean, the Zoom interview, there were 11 people. He was number 80 in line to get a job. Just basically a lost cause and a little bit of foreshadowing to the end of the video. But with the second clip, the woman saying she couldn't name the company because she knew that she wouldn't be able to get a job if she actually put them on blast in public. That has become an issue as well. So a lot of people complaining about all of these companies, but you can't really say it in public, or you'd kind of get blackballed from your entire sector. There are also people getting in trouble for just making these videos, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. We're going to transition into a lot of the slimeball tactics that these companies have been doing over the past few years to try to fire people, thin them down, lowball them, all the cost cutting measures Dell just ambushed its workers, giving them a two-day notice to return to the office full-time five days a week in what amounts to a brutal quiet firing. Yes, you heard that right, a two-day notice. This is one of the most aggressive quiet firings ever. Earlier in the year, Dell faked out its employees by giving them the option to be either hybrid or remote. The only catch was if you chose to remain fully remote, you would not be eligible for any promotion or role change. Even with the harsh penalty of no promotion, half of Dell's workforce decided to remain remote. So that's when Dell management concocted this scheme to ambush workers with just a two-day notice to return to work full-time. So I would say this is the most aggressive quiet firing that I've heard literally only a couple days. I remember seeing Patagonia, I think, was a couple weeks. I mean, there are many, many companies doing this. It's just their way of trying to get rid of a whole bunch of people without legitimately having to go, hey, you're fired, get out of here. But I still don't understand how they're allowed to do this. There were so many companies during COVID saying, all right, we're going to go remote. Here's your laptop. You're never going to have to go in for work again. We could just do the Zoom calls. You could do everything in your living room, won't have a problem with that. And within a couple of years, they just backpedal on that. Now, I've seen conflicting reasons because of this. Some people say that everybody who is working at home were super lazy, not getting enough done, even though it seemed like it made a lot more people happy instead of having to do the 9 to 5 corporate office, sitting in traffic for hours a day, back and forth commute. And then I've heard other reasons with these giant corporations having these massive office buildings that are basically useless now. You're not going to turn them into malls or shopping centers. Those are dying as well. So it would just be dead real estate, just hemorrhaging money because these are worth millions of dollars. So I think a lot of companies went, well, we already have the office, just bring them back into work like it was before COVID. But when you promise something that is overall a better deal and let people do it for years like the remote work from COVID and then just take all of that away, clearly you're going to have a lot of people who are not happy about it at all. We have another comment from one of you guys. Wife was let go after five years in the same company one week before her maternity leave started. At my job, people with decades of service in the same company were recently let go. Always keep your resume updated and don't sacrifice work-life balance for any job. And that's why I knew I was never going to be able to work a normal corporate job. There's just no security. I'd rather just take my chances and work for myself because one of the supposed benefits for these types of jobs is the steady income, the checks every couple of weeks. You're supposed to have all the benefits. But even if you put in decades of your life to these companies, if there's any downturn of market or they're trying to thin out the herd, it doesn't matter if you're higher up on the food chain, you're still going to get cut. But I think this was a good transition with the maternity leave for this clip. I'm probably going to get punched at this deposition, but it's going to be worth it. So my client was fired within three weeks of announcing she was pregnant. Pretty suspicious. But when they fired her, HR said that she was being laid off due to a lack of work. Fine. Well, she applied for unemployment. On the unemployment paperwork, HR lied and said that she resigned. They did this so that she wouldn't be able to collect unemployment money. But resigning and being laid off due to a lack of work, that's a conflicting story. So here's how we're going to handle this. We're going to appeal. We're going to show the conflicting story and get this girl paid. But after that, I'm going to call this HR rep into a deposition and I'm going to confront them and say, were you lying when you said that she was laid off due to a lack of work? Or were you lying when you said she resigned? Because both of these can't be true. And here's what's so fun about it. No matter what their answer is, they have to admit they're lying on at least one occasion. And they're going to hate me. Now, this isn't the first time you've ever heard this kind of nightmare HR stories, but I thought this comment from this video was very true in telling of the lack of consequences for any of these corporations. They'll probably just say it was an administrative error and nothing will really happen. They have so much power over you, basically being able to fire you at any point, legitimately straight up lying about it for no reason. Honestly, it's not like the unemployment she would have collected would have been taken out of the HR's bankroll, but they do it just to be a nightmare. And I could definitely see the administrative error and there'll be no consequences. We have another comment from one of you guys. My husband is a physical therapist. He worked for the same home health company for 19 years, won awards, always got the highest ratings on his reviews. And last year they restructured and laid off all of the long-term employees. Wow, shocker, I wonder why. They hired new grads instead. He got no severance, zero dollars, and our health insurance coverage ended the end of that month. So I know a lot of the clips you've probably seen talking about the job market have been people from the Gen Z around my age era, but it seems like now if you are in that range where it's too early for you to retire, maybe the 40s, 50s area, if you get laid off now, it almost seems like there is no hope because of course you've gone up on the totem pole, you've been getting pay increases for quite a long time, and now that they're trying to thin the herd and cut costs, they're not trying to hire somebody who would be making way more than a new grad, even though it doesn't really seem like they are hiring new grads. I don't know who's working, man. I am absolutely livid right now. I graduated in May with a degree in marketing. Okay, it's now September and I've been on the job hunt for a long time. I know it's hard for everyone. I know it's oversaturated, but what they're doing to people with marketing, communications, business degrees is sinister on LinkedIn. Sinister. There are these agencies that pretend to be legit companies, but they're door-to-door solar panel Verizon salesmen. I cannot get tricked into one more of these Zoom interviews. I was supposed to be at a lunch. I pushed it back for this fucking Zoom, and guess what? I applied to a title that said Social Media Marketing Assistant. Read the job description, looked at the company's profile, looked legit. Another one of these people, they go, yeah, we can work up to that role. We can definitely work up to that role, but it's gonna be door-to-door. We go to the home to be personal. I am not going to the home. I just don't understand how there hasn't been some sort of issue with sites like Indeed and LinkedIn with all of these scam companies, either being completely false and just taking your data, which we'll talk about in a second, or just lying about what the job description actually is, because she was basically just going to become the door-to-door solar salesman, even though that isn't in the realm of what she was applying for, but apparently that's just okay. And again, this isn't like a dime-a-dozen story. You could go and just keep scrolling on TikTok of the same type of story over and over again. We have some comments from this video. Still can't understand how those job listings are legal. I did not get my degree to join a pyramid scheme. Why do I search marketing jobs and the only thing are those door-to-door salesmen's pyramid scheme jobs and merchandising? I did not get a degree to be a TJ Maxx employee. We have another comment from one of you guys. The job market is an absolute cesspool. Companies are either posting ghost jobs, even though they already picked their candidate, or looking for unicorns with a million certificates and the perfect combinations of skills, and also will work for less than their worth. They're definitely not going to pay top dollar even for that unicorn employee, but we could talk a little bit more about ghost jobs. The job search is so bad right now that a lot of legitimate jobs are basically ghost jobs. Let me explain. Companies are getting so many applicants that they're being very unserious and extremely picky. It's like tender on steroids, and we're seeing companies on their worst behavior. Some companies close job postings after 24 to 48 hours, but others keep the application open for weeks or months until they hire somebody, even though they've stopped considering people to put in the interview process after that first 24 to 48 hours. So many job postings after that first 24 or 48 hours, you can essentially consider them ghost jobs. Next, even when you apply to a job within the window, often companies are not even considering everyone who applied. They may pick the first 10 who look qualified, and then they ignore the rest. So there are many qualified people who are not even being considered. Remember what I said about being super picky? Some companies look, take the first few that seem to be qualified, find that they don't want them, and the reason could be for something super picky. But rather than reach out to more applicants, the company just reposts the role again, takes the first 10, rents, and repeat. This is why you see so many jobs get reposted over and over again. The company's being picky and playing games. And not only is that happening, it must just be a magic coincidence that when you put all of this information onto job listings on Indeed and LinkedIn from these huge companies, you start getting a ton of spam, phone calls, emails, text messages, just getting hit nonstop. It could be the legitimate scams that I made a whole dedicated video about. It could just be companies saying that, hey, you got this position and something that you never applied for has nothing to do with what you originally signed up for, or the original job listing just didn't exist in general. And it's basically a shell company to get a whole bunch of people's information to sell, because that is what everybody's doing now. Everybody's got to be collecting data and selling it to somebody. So that's just another avenue to get more information out of you and I will say right off the bat that I am not sponsored, but I do know that there are companies that are out there to try to minimize that as much as possible, like Delete.me. So maybe if you are getting a ungodly amount of spam calls and all your emails are flooded and you're getting text messages, I'd probably look into some of those companies. Again, not sponsored. I just want to put my two cents into it, but I just have a screenshot from somebody. Be careful with these ghost jobs. I can't say what I want to say. Again, something pretty common with a lot of these clips, but if you know, you know, be careful all that info you're filing and no responses, just like I'm saying before. There's a lot more people starting to realize that a lot of this stuff is a scam. Some of the comments, oh, they totally sell our information. I feel like I'm picking up what you're saying, but a lot of these people don't want to outwardly say it, because I mean, if you have any of your social media accounts with your real last names, it could be a huge red flag to just not get hired by any of these companies, because they could see this as a potential risk and already with the difficult job market now, you're just not going to get picked up in general. So you could see legitimate scams online now, but people are so scared of getting blacklisted from a potential job that they won't share to the public, which is just unbelievable. But we do have another comment from one of you guys in Australia. Apparently there was approximately 700,000 layoffs during this recession period. I left my science job to become a bus driver. I spent five years studying, have a bachelor's and a master's. After two years, I realized the truth of the rat race and it was draining. Even though I miss being stimulated by science, they aren't going to pay my bills and allow me to live the way I want. Don't be a slave to the job. It's not your identity. And I think a lot of people around my age are starting to realize that and it's just something to clock in and clock out. It's not something you should be loyal with because this company won't be loyal to you. And I think a lot of people have taken that in the way of like Gen Z is super lazy and they don't want to work. And I'm not saying that all of them But I would say a couple of generations ago when you were actually taken care of by the company you put a good portion of your life to, it gave you a reason to be more loyal. But now that's just not the case at all. Inflation is killing people's wages. They're not even making enough to survive, let alone thrive. And if you say something wrong, the quarterly report is bad or the stock goes down, you're just cut. So there's a lot of people around my age that just don't take loyalty to a company seriously. And I will also say, because this comment says that they're from Australia, it's not just a problem in the U.S. I know obviously, because most of us do live in the U.S., we just hear about news from ourselves. But look up stuff about Canada. Look up stuff about Australia, Europe in general. Everybody's having problems with it right now. And I would say Canada and Australia, especially with housing prices, with layoffs, they're actually in a worse situation than we are. So it's not like everybody else is thriving in the U.S. is just the one currently imploding. Everybody's having issues right now. It's not one, two, four, five months. Yeah, actually I'd like to not get paid for forever. Please. Somebody sat there writing this job application out and said, you know what? Let's just throw in the option for forever. Never gonna pay you. Not even once. The next question, what is your most defining skill? Sniffing out bullshit. Don't apply for this job. No, no, no. I have made two dedicated videos that I think were both pretty long. They were both about a half an hour each of just knocking out all of these listings. It's an unlimited amount. It almost seems like it's a joke from any sort of job you could think of. All these ridiculous demands or just not being paid like this one basically seems like a startup. I guess you're just not going to get paid. There were some of them where you had to pay for their applications to use. Again, you kind of just have to see it to believe it, but that could probably be a regular weekly series on this channel, just looking up absolute crap job listings. We have another comment from one of you guys. If you still got a job in 2024, save as much of your income like your life depends on it. Start canceling those subscriptions and non-essentials because you have no idea how much that starts racking up. Every streaming service that you don't really need. I just subscribed to Netflix recently because there is a documentary coming out that I thought would be really good to make a video about on this channel. Now, unfortunately, it doesn't come out for several weeks, but it ended up being after tax 24, like 50 a month for Netflix alone for me. So imagine you have all the other ones, Hulu, Disney, Starz, HBO Max, any of the live streaming sports stuff, Peacock, ESPN Plus. It could be way more expensive than the TV channels ever were. Pay off your debts, downsize your lifestyle, prepare for the storm. It could take until late 2025 until everything stabilizes economically. Now, I think a lot of people are doing this in general already just because they can't afford normal groceries, not just the luxury lifestyle and buying yachts and all that kind of crap. And honestly, I think people would be really happy if everything gets better within a year. I think that's kind of hopeful. I applied to 50 jobs where I was overqualified and I heard back from 48% of them. All of them were rejections and I worked at companies like Apple, Microsoft, KPMG and Barclays in the resume. I'm trying to see if recruiters would interview me if I was an overqualified candidate. I created two resumes, resume number one, where the resume was overqualified and resume number two, where the resume was qualified and he led towards the job title operations. I found 50 job postings to apply to with resume number one and then waited two days to apply to the same 50 jobs resume number two. This actually tells us a couple of things. Number one, just because you work at a big name company does not mean you're going to get interviews. What matters more is if your experiences truly match the job that you're going for. And number two, the job market is really difficult right now. I'm hearing from recruiters that some are getting 30 applications a day, sometimes even hundreds. It's sometimes not your resume. It's sometimes that there's just so many qualified candidates and you might just be candidate number two or number three. So I could agree with some of the stuff that he says there. However, I think if you have, I worked for Google or I worked for Meta or Facebook or that level, you know, Microsoft tech company, but in whatever sector you're in, I think right away, one of the big company named guys would get pushed away because they would clearly want more compensation. They worked for somebody in the S&P 500 or, you know, that level, right? It's much harder to lowball them compared to a normal person who just fits the mold for their job. And unfortunately, there are still so many people who fit that mold and there's only one job application. And like we saw previously with Clips, these listings will just sit and accumulate more and more applications, whether they use them or not, possibly selling data or just almost false hope. Either way, it's not a good thing if you're actively searching for a job right now. Another comment from one of you guys, the corporate American dream is dead. 10 years ago, people were laughing at entrepreneurs and YouTubers trying to downplay them. But now being a business owner or business creative is one of the only few ways that America once promised with a college degree and a corporate job. Now, I didn't put this comment in just to try to say, you know, everybody's got to be their own businessman, you know, the entrepreneurial mogul and all of that. But I think a lot of the millennial and Gen Z were told to get a business degree, finance degree, any of the tech jobs, and you'd be able to make a good amount of money and you wouldn't really have to worry about finances. And because so many people ended up getting it, now the markets are flooded. There's only a finite amount of jobs in these sectors. And when they're all filled up or if the market turns and they have to start firing people, whenever they do hire again, if they do, they're going to start lowballing a lot of these people because there are so many candidates. Now, from all of these videos of people talking about the markets, I've actually seen that some of these people have been getting fired just speaking about it. That's why we saw earlier in the video, a couple of people weren't saying the actual names of the company or didn't want to say really anything out loud, even the blatant scams that they were seeing on LinkedIn, because now it gives a company another reason to be able to fire you. So, y'all know I'm always on here making like funny TikToks. When I be like on breakout work and stuff, I'll be making TikToks. So the TikToks that I made just got me fired. They just fired my ass. So y'all be careful with posting TikToks, even if it's not your voice, even if you're not saying where you work at, you being in uniform and making certain TikToks with certain captions or anything can cause you to get fucking fired from your job at a clinic. So, I mean, I know I'm definitely not one of the best candidates for any of these types of jobs with my lack of degree. But on top of it, if they looked up my name online and saw any of these videos, I guarantee I would be in the same boat as them. I would never be able to get hired or probably fired, even though I'm not outwardly saying something bad about a specific company, just saying all the problems that a lot of people are having right now. But these companies don't want to hear it. They just want to have cogs in the machines. They want to have drones. No issues, no problems. And they're already looking for an excuse to be able to cut off a little bit more people to save a little bit more money. And you'd be on the chopping block, apparently, if you start making any of these TikTok videos. And we're going to end off this video with a comment that I think of quite a lot, honestly, even though I guess it would sound a little bit morbid. But my dad only got two years of retirement before he passed away. And the only reason he got those two years was because Covid happened and he decided to retire early. He had one good year and was diagnosed with lung cancer. If it weren't for Covid, he would have worked until he got sick. And the only retirement he would have gotten before dying would have been the eight months he was on chemo, radiation and then hospice. All the years people work so hard to enjoy retirement and they don't even live long enough to enjoy it. So I know that the job market is really difficult to even land a job. Something with a decent enough pay to outpace the cost of living that has just been rising year after year. And now the talks of people pushing back their retirement 65, 70, 75, I've heard if you could even retire now. But giving your all to these companies to hopefully be able to retire one day and live out, you know, the last 15, 20 years of your life in peace isn't a guarantee. I know that as a species, we've been living longer and longer. But from what a majority of our diets are and what we're exposed to, I don't think everybody's going to be living to 100 or 110 breaking records. And if we are, how many people do you really see at 95 or 100 years old? You know, walking around, jogging around super fine. If they are alive, most of the time they're in very bad shape. I know that I'm young and I have a long way to go if I do even hit that kind of number. But you never really know how long you actually have on this planet. So literally killing yourselves over these jobs end up not really being worth it. So let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. 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