In January, Jon Bach was fired as a director at eBay, where he had worked for 13 years. He loved his job, so he was disappointed. But he didn’t panic. The unemployment rate was near a five-decade low, and he had 30 years of experience in the tech industry. Could it be difficult to find another job?

Quite difficult, it turned out. After applying for 135 open positions, Bach received 91 non-responses, 42 rejections, two callbacks – and no offers. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a minute and I’ve proven my worth. And then you apply for one spot, two spots, 10 spots, 50 spots, 135 spots. And you say, ‘Am I the guy I think I am?’ I am?'”

By all standard economic measures, the U.S. labor market appears to be doing well. But ask white-collar workers who are actually looking for a job and they’ll tell you horror stories that sound eerily similar to Bach’s. As I wrote last spring, this is because the job market has essentially split into two distinct tiers. Although hiring held up well for low-income workers, it fell for people earning six figures or more. We are in the middle of a white-collar recession.

Now, new data from LinkedIn — which tracks how often its users land new jobs — shows which white-collar jobs are being hit hardest. Some of these are the usual suspects during a recession. We don’t need recruiters when we’re not recruiting, which is why hiring in human resources has fallen 28% since 2018. Hiring in marketing, another department that is often the first to lose its budget in times of crisis, are down 23%.

But the most surprising aspect of the employment freeze is the decline in the technology sector. Hiring plunged 27% in IT, 32% in quality assurance and 23% in product management. In Bach’s program and project management area, recruitment fell by 25%. Even more surprising, engineering, long considered recession-proof, is down 26%. This type of reduction in the number of coders has long been unthinkable in Silicon Valley, which treated programmers like rare minerals – so rare that they had to be preserved at all costs, regardless of the economic situation.

On the other hand, the professions are holding up well. Military and protective services, a category that includes security guards, is down just 6%. Community and social services are down just 3%. And health care, which faces a severe staffing shortage fueled by an aging population and extraordinary levels of burnout on the front lines, is actually up 10%. You can see the same winners and losers on recruiting platforms like Indeed: since the pandemic, job postings for doctors and physical therapists have increased by more than 80%, while those for software developers, analysts Data scientists, data scientists and IT operations have declined by 20% or more.

“We have not seen a slowdown in hiring anywhere,” said Kory Kantenga, economist at LinkedIn. “But there are particular areas where it has been very dramatic.”

Why has technology slowed down hiring? One reason is that tech companies, panicked by the Great resignation that followed the pandemic, hired far too many professionals, leaving them with a glut of staff when the economy hit the skids. LinkedIn, which compared hiring from 2018 to 2022, found that post-pandemic hiring increased by 89% for product managers, 79% for human resources professionals, and 43% for engineers. When employers realized they had overreached, some resorted to mass layoffs to reduce their workforce. But most have chosen a gentler path, freezing hiring to gradually reduce their ranks through voluntary attrition.

Another reason tech companies are hiring fewer professionals is because their existing employees are choosing to stay put. “One of the things we hear consistently is that candidates are looking for stability,” says Jenny Diani, senior director of global technical recruiting at Autodesk, a leading software vendor. “Candidates are much more cautious.” Visier, an HR software provider, reports that voluntary turnover among its technology clients so far this year is less than 20%, compared to nearly 27% in 2022. This means that a company that wants to maintain a workforce of 10,000 employees is expected to hire 720 fewer professionals this year.

AI could also play a role in the hiring freeze. With tools like ChatGPT allowing tech workers to complete their tasks more quickly, employers might see less need to increase their workforce. Nowhere is this productivity gain more evident than in coding: In an early study of an AI coding co-pilot, AI-assisted programmers were 56% faster than programmers working alone. Google recently boasted that more than a quarter of its new code was now AI-generated.

“It’s not like you’re going to lay off an entire team,” says Jon Stross, co-founder of Greenhouse, one of the largest providers of recruiting software. “But maybe we don’t need to grow as fast because we can automate more things and be more efficient. I guess there are people trying to make that happen.”

Worse yet, changes in the way companies hire are causing jobs to freeze. feel even more terrible than the figures indicate. Several job seekers I spoke with told me their searches had been “slow,” which is an understatement. As of mid-2021, according to Greenhouse, it was taking its customers an average of 52 days to complete a rental. In the first quarter of this year, searches lasted up to 66 days.

The slowdown in decision-making is a bit paradoxical. Given all the qualified candidates currently in the market, you would think that companies would have an easier time making a selection. But strangely, the seemingly endless supply of candidates makes them want to revisit even more requests before making a decision. “In the recruiting world, we call it See More disease,” says Diani, who is juggling three times as many applications at Autodesk as during the Great Resignation. “We really need to explain to our managers that even in this market, people with highly skilled and in-demand skills won’t stay forever.”

What shocks job seekers the most, however, is how many positions they have to apply to just to get a few measly callbacks. Bach’s 135 submissions may seem crazy, but these days, it’s actually the new normal. Santiago Rodriguez, a data scientist, told me he applied for 669 positions – so many that he built a online dashboard to track your progress. As a good statistician, he plans to analyze the data to see which versions of his resume generate a higher success rate.

It doesn’t help that candidates, desperate to land a new position, are responding to the hiring slowdown by applying to every job in sight. LinkedIn has an “Easy Apply” button that makes it easy to flood the marketplace with apps, and AI-powered services will even do that. mass apply for jobs for you. It makes sense for job seekers to maximize their chances by applying widely. But the more everyone gets involved, the harder it becomes for everyone to stand out. In the first quarter of this year, job postings at Greenhouse clients received an average of 222 applications, almost three times more than at the end of 2021. “This is exacerbated by the fact that everyone in this arms race is applying for so many jobs that companies are just applying.” overwhelmed with applicants,” Stross says. “And so they don’t get back to people.”

For job seekers, being ghosted makes the process downright dehumanizing. “There’s so much anxiety,” Stross says. “Like, ‘I need a job and I can’t get anyone to look at my resume.'”

The good news is that some data suggests we are already past the worst of the white-collar recession. At the end of last year, according to industry group CompTIA, companies posted just 144,000 new tech positions. That figure has now rebounded to 223,000 openings – and is starting to approach the pre-pandemic level of 322,000 jobs. “We’re slowly, slowly recovering,” says Art Zeile, CEO of Dice, a tech job site. The hope is that in the new year, with the election over and some further interest rate cuts in the economy, employers will regain their appetite to start hiring again.

“I’m hopeful,” Bach told me. “I think a lot of people like me are eager to get back to work, to show companies that we’re worth taking a chance on. If you take a risk with me, I’ll show you that I’m worth it.”

Aki Ito is chief correspondent for Business Insider.

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