Tech jobs are mired in a recession

In January, Jon Bach got laid off 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. How hard could it be to find another job?

Pretty hard, it turned out. After applying for 135 openings, Bach has received 91 nonresponses, 42 rejections, two callbacks — and zero offers. "I don't know what's going on," he says. "I've been doing this for a minute, and I've proven my value. And then you apply to one place, two places, 10 places, 50 places, 135 places. And you go, 'Am I the guy I think I am?'"

By all the standard economic measures, America's labor market looks fine. But ask white-collar professionals who are actually looking for a job, and they'll tell you horror stories that are eerily similar to Bach's. As I wrote last spring, that's because the job market has essentially split into two distinct tiers. Even though hiring has held up well for lower-earning workers, it has plunged for people earning six figures or more. We're in the midst of a white-collar recession.

Now, new data from LinkedIn — which tracked how often its users landed new jobs — shows which white-collar jobs are being hit the hardest. Some of them are the usual suspects in a downturn. You don't need recruiters when you're not recruiting, so hiring in human resources has slumped by 28% since 2018. Hiring in marketing, another department that's often the first to lose its budget in leaner times, is down 23%.

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