OK, great pep talk. Now get out there and submit some cover letters!

If you’ve pursued white-collar work lately, there’s a good reason why your head’s always looking for a good wall to smack itself against: The market is brutal, per The Wall Street Journal.

Remember the friendly post-pandemic hiring market?

That’s been pretty well-obliterated in many industries, including real estate, finance, and tech. It’s a simple case of supply and demand:

• Supply is down: US job postings have dropped by ~500k since 2022.
• Demand is up: The market’s flooded with experienced candidates following two layoff-packed years — tech firms alone have shed ~363k roles since last year.

The result?

Competition. So much competition. AT&T, for one, said its applicants per posting have nearly doubled YoY.

Employers are realizing they once again get to be picky as hell.

• Companies are taking longer to make their picks, per WSJ, with hiring now averaging 11 weeks, up from seven weeks in 2021.
• That’s taking its toll on candidates, who’ve seen the norm increase from one or two interview rounds to an average of three to four.

In other words, if it isn’t going great for you out there, it isn’t necessarily on you.

By the way…

The WSJ highlighted an applicant who completed nine rounds of interviews only to have the company ghost her.

Prospective employers, need a quick etiquette refresher? We pulled together this handy guide:

• Candidate completes one interview: Not OK to ghost.
• Candidate completes two or more rounds: Not OK to ghost.

That’s it. Hope this helps.

Between January 2020 and February 2022, remote tech jobs are up 420%+ in the US. For context, that’s a jump from 4.4% to 22%+ of total tech jobs.

And now, thanks to a combination of macroeconomic factors, many of those same jobs are moving abroad, per WSJ.

Where are they going?

One popular destination is Canada, due to its comparatively lax immigration policy for tech workers:

• The US issues 65k visas for skilled workers annually, plus 20k for workers who hold graduate degrees from American universities.
• Canada doesn’t cap its visas for incoming tech workers, resulting in an influx of immigrants from China, India, and Eastern Europe in recent years.

This difference in immigration policy is one reason Toronto, which has added more tech jobs than any other city in North America since 2016 (81k), has been called the next Silicon Valley.

In the US…

… many tech companies are desperate for new hires. The unemployment rate for tech jobs was 1.3% in March — the lowest it’s been since 2019.

Critics argue that if the US doesn’t change its immigration policy to bring in more skilled workers, it could lose its crown as the global leader in technology and innovation.

One company that’s benefitting from the mismatch between America’s visa supply and tech job demand? MobSquad, which pairs American tech companies with foreign workers, then helps them move to Canada.

That means babysitting left the yearly increases in both national average wage (4.7%) and inflation (7%) in the dust.

It’s a major shift from the prior year’s 3.9% jump, and the result of a combo-punch of labor shortages and new, better-credentialed entrants like teachers and nurses.

(TIL: Supposedly “babysitting” has different meanings around the world.)

At the start of 2019, 30% of the jobs for West Coast tech companies were listed outside of the region. That’s now 43%.

You could say the big winners here are states that attracted lots of this talent like Texas and Virginia, but then again, rent in Austin was up ~25% last year.

In the US, the role requires many years of training and commands a median salary of $130k+.

Due to the expertise required and the boom-bust nature of air travel, pilots’ unions are also among the world’s most powerful, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The airline-union relationship has been strained by the pandemic

Unlike many other jobs, pilots are unable to work remotely — so their bargaining power vis a vis the airlines has taken a hit:

• American Airlines has furloughed 1.6k pilots
• Norwegian Airlines has furloughed or cut 1.9k jobs
• Southwest Airlines is on the cusp of furloughing pilots for the first time ever (we wrote more about Southwest here)

Even airlines that have avoided job cuts (like Delta) are guaranteeing fewer hours and reducing pay.

One union president tells the WSJ that he believes airlines are angling to use the pandemic to permanently cut costs.

It’s very expensive to get a pilot’s license 

Total cost: between $60k-$80k, by one estimate.

Furlough schemes typically put the most junior pilots out of work first, making it difficult to pay off the training.

But if airlines lose too much capacity, it could burn them in a few years.

“If you think the industry is going to be recovered by 2025,” a United executive said on an industry call in November, “we need to start to think about how to attract those pilots of the future today.”

During the pandemic, the rapid transition to digital everything has exacerbated these fears.

Against this backdrop, an interesting new research paper from James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross looks at “Automation and the Fate of Young Workers.”

Going back to phone operator times

Per Gross, one of the biggest labor shocks of the 20th century was the automation of telephone operators, a common entry-level role for young women in the 1920s.

At the time, AT&T was the country’s largest employer and had hundreds of thousands of operators on its payroll. Over the next 50 years, it replaced humans with mechanical dials and switches.

By the 1960s, these dials handled more than 60% of AT&T’s network.

What happened to the labor market?

The research found divergent results for two cohorts of labor:

• Existing operators that were automated away were “less likely to be working in the next decade.”
• New entrants to the labor market were able to find stepping-stone roles in jobs with similar requirements (typists, secretaries).

Of course, 2020 is a much different situation than 1920. But this is an interesting reminder that labor markets have historically had the capacity to adjust to massive shocks.

Who among us hasn’t — at some point — tried to pass summer lifeguarding off as “internship experience,” or peddle basic math skills as “proficiency with Excel?”

Applying for that very first gig is the ultimate catch-22: no one will give a job unless you’ve already had a job.

Enter Handshake: A platform for college-aged students to get hired

The networking and recruiting startup has made waves targeting a frequently overlooked part of the job market: the college student in search of their first real job.

Fresh off raising $80M, Handshake is ramping up its focus on the job market’s newest entrants. The startup claims it has:

• 17m job seekers
• 1k college and university partners
• 500k employers looking for cheap labor

By de-emphasizing prior experience, Handshake says it’s helping to encourage more diversity in the workforce.

A gradual shift from in-person job fairs to virtual events

This transition predates 2020, but has been accelerated by the pandemic. It’s part of a larger shakeup in education that saw a 16% decrease in first-year student count for the current fall semester.

With these trends in mind, Handshake is broadening its reach to focus on community colleges and more vocational training programs.

If Handshake succeeds, we might lose the greatest corporate meme ever created:

But these days, there’s a good chance the person on the other end is a solo contractor working out of her bedroom.

Airbnb, Disney, Comcast, AT&T, Amazon, Walgreens, and dozens of other big companies have turned over their customer service work to Arise Virtual Solutions — a gig platform that’s seen a huge jump in demand since the pandemic.

The pitch to companies is simple

Going with Arise is way cheaper than hiring your own employees.

The way Arise saves money is less appealing: The company shifts the costs of equipment and training onto its independent contractors — and charges them a fee to use its platform.

The company says its reps get to work for themselves

But according to a ProPublica report, Arise contractors are treated like W-2 employees, sans the benefits.

Arise contractors don’t get to schedule their own time, and are required to work a minimum of 20 hours a week. With charges and fees factored in, many also earn below minimum wage with no overtime eligibility.

Even by gig work standards, the company falls short: In private arbitration, judges have concluded that the company is an “elaborate construct” to avoid treating its workers as real employees.

The Blue Origin jobs site currently has 221 openings, including:

• 28 roles for Engine, Propulsion, and Fluids
• 24 roles for Manufacturing and Assembly, and…
• 1 role for Orbital Habitat Formulation Lead

What on Earth is that last job?

The role will lay the groundwork for a space economy

Per the job description for Orbital Habitat Formulation Lead, Blue Origin’s goal is to have millions of people living and working in space.

To build an economy in space, the habitat formation role entails creating a roadmap for “low earth orbit (LEO) habitable stations” that can exceed the capabilities of the International Space Station (ISS).

The company offers “competitive compensation” (no word on whether it subsidizes Peloton bike purchases).

Blue Origin has awesome alumni…

… including Neal Stephenson, famed sci-fi author of Snow Crash.

Stephenson worked at Blue Origin from 1999 to 2006, where he “[punched] down ethernet cables” and investigated “possible alternatives to conventional rockets as ways of getting into space.”

The experience became fodder for a later book and — based on how good it was — we’d love for him to take this new job opening for more material.

According to the coffee colossus, COVID-19 — and the related fall in foot traffic — led to a revenue decline of $2.3B last quarter.

As highlighted by Medium’s Steve LeVine, Starbucks is only one data point in a much bigger story: the destruction of the multitrillion-dollar office support economy.

Every related industry affected

Levine rattles off some sobering stats:

• Tens of thousands of office support workers have lost their jobs
• Around $2T in corporate travel will not happen this year
• As of July, ~$21B of hotel-related mortgage loans were delinquent (versus ~$1.15B pre-pandemic)

The next victim: city finances  

Whether or not these jobs and businesses return, US cities will be feeling the aftereffects.

With white-collar workers spending less, sales and income taxes will fall. A survey conducted by the National League of Cities showed an average expected decline of 13% in revenue next year, a decline comparable to the 2008-09 financial crisis.

It’s not just money, either. MIT economist David Autor believes the very “cultural vitality of cities” is at risk because of the slowing economy.

What are the longer-term trends?

Levine drops a note of optimism, citing a research paper on postwar Tokyo: “long-lived cities undergoing great temporary shock tend to bounce back.”

Superstar cities like New York and San Francisco have long been criticized for their high cost of living and congestion.

As the remote work shakeout leads more people to flee such cities, there may be an opportunity to bring in a diverse mix of city dwellers to turbocharge the next period of economic dynamism.