Q&A of the Day – How Hard is it to Get a New Job?

I felt it would be valuable to share this extraordinarily well crafted and presented entry in its entirety as it provides an additional level of insight to the larger discussion of what’s really going on with the labor market amid the historically negative revisions we’ve had to the government’s numbers this week, and also on the heels of last week’s disappointing reports. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Have a question or topic you want to have addressed.
Just ask. This is the Brian mud Show Today's Q
and A. How hard is it to get a new job?
This brought to you by Melissa and Ashes. Check Mark
Collection says we continue to monitor the manhunt for the
assassin of Charlie Kirk as we are also in this

(00:25):
twenty fourth anniversary of nine to eleven. Quite the day
and difficult times where a lot of people have been
trying to get a job too, and so let's dive
into this. Each day I feature a listener question sent
by one of these methods. You may email me Brian
Mudd at iHeartMedia dot com, hit me up on social ats.
Brianman Radio may also use the iHeartRadio talkback feature. We'd
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(00:47):
Brian Mudshow podcast number two preset. And while you're in there,
look for a little microphone button and you see it,
tap it. Laid down the message right there, maybe for
future Q and A. And by the way, I'm thinking
about doing something tomorrow with the Q and I to wear.
It's just your thoughts and Charlie and so you know
you want to share it, go ahead, and do that,
and you know, I might say about going ahead and

(01:08):
just let everybody share their thoughts about the man tomorrow.
Today's note, Hi, Brian. As a listener and fellow Republican,
I appreciate the way you cut through the noise and
explain daily concerns with clarity and facts. I've been in
recruiting for many years, and i could tell you the
job market has been dismal since mid twenty twenty three,

(01:30):
worse than most reports admit. Well. The BLS is only
now showing weakness. The corrections over the past two years
prove the data have been unreliable. Survey return rates hundred
and fifty percent with corrections well over at one million jobs.
Here's what I'm seeing firsthand AI impact. Roughly fifteen to
twenty percent of certain roles are being automated away, PPP

(01:53):
loans dried up, rainy day funds gone more with less
profits are thin, so hiring is cut back and Florida
alone manufacturing jobs are down thirty one thousand in one year.
Bottleneck at the top senior level employees aren't moving, so
growth stalls. Internal promotions over hiring to keep staff, companies

(02:15):
promote internally rather than hire restless employees. Those passed over
internally are only applying elsewhere for promotions, which is driving
applicant polls to four hundred to one thousand per role,
competing with externals out of work. It's brutal to the
likes of which we've never seen middle level cuts. Companies

(02:37):
are eliminating or consolidating middle management while barely hanging on
a key top factor. The return to office is a
major issue. People moved and are not able to get roles.
Many Florida newcomers are finding this out. The list of
many variables are in play. This is all on top
of recent uncertainty with taroffs, but I would not say

(02:59):
that tariffs are the only concern, although it's causing more uncertainty.
It's a lot of moving parts on top of it all.
Age discrimination over forty is more blatant than ever, yet
many don't show up on unemployment roles. You see it
all over LinkedIn and it isn't just the squeaky wheels.
While this has always happened, we've never seen agism at

(03:20):
these levels as getting one over forty and looking their
average search is stretched past twenty seven months up to
two years. Plus it isn't good. This is a market
unlike anything recruiters have seen in twenty five plus years,
and it's getting worse. The numbers are flawed in a
big way. Most markets correct and replaced with new titles, etc.

(03:41):
But AI has introduced an alternative to lessen the teams
they have and not to add to the teams. I
wish I had better news, but this is what's happening
that the media isn't discussing forever two years now, Okay,
So I felt it would be valuable to share this
extraordinarily well crafted and presented injury in its entirety, as

(04:02):
it provides an additional level of insight to the larger
discussion of what's really going on with the labor market
amid the historically negative revisions we've had to the government
job numbers this week and also in the heels of
last week's disappointment reports. So here's a quick refresh of
what's recently been reported. Over the course of two years,

(04:27):
not so coincidentally overlapped with the final two years of
the Biden administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was found
to have overstated job growth by a total of one
point seven to three million jobs, or an average overstatement
of one hundred and forty four thousand jobs per month.
In other words, BLS's monthly reports have become essentially useless,

(04:47):
and these revisions demonstrate once again that the ADP report,
which showed consistently lower job growth, has been the far
more accurate way to track private private sector job growth.
And by the way, in last week's report, ADP did
cite AI as a concern in the job market for
the first time. Now, to break down the overall significance

(05:09):
of what we're talking about here, consider this. In twenty
twenty four, the average reported job gains per month were
originally reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be
one hundred and eighty six thousand per month. In reality,
based on this week's reported revisions, the actual average number
of new jobs created per month would have been only
forty two thousand, or, in other words, seventy eight percent

(05:34):
seventy eight percent fewer new jobs than there were said
to be. It's incredible, but even then, that barely begins
to tell the bigger story. For the few new jobs
that had been created in recent years, they often weren't
going to Americans. Based on government data that had first
reported in July. One percentage of jobs added in this

(05:57):
country during the Biden administration went to natural born citizens
only fifty nine percent. Now forty one percent the jobs
add in this country over the four years of the
Buiding administration went to foreign born persons. Now, some of
those did go to legal immigrants, those on work visis
what have you, But the majority went to people who
didn't even legally enter this country, or should I say,

(06:19):
in a minimum, those who gained the assagonym system and
the TPS system under a complicit administration. So, now when
you account for the number of jobs added that were
available for actual American American citizens, how many jobs? We're
only talking about twenty five thousand new jobs available per
month over the prior year. So let's fully break this

(06:43):
down to show how big of a deal that really is.
Last year, due to the open border policies of the
Buid administration, and estimated two hundred and thirty thousand jobs
per month were needed just to keep pace with population growth,
or two hundred five thousand more jobs than were actually added.
To put a finer point on this as it applies

(07:05):
to American citizens, one point four or five million fewer
jobs were added last year than would have been necessary
to simply maintain the employment of born Americans. This dynamic
helps explain why the labor force participation rate is a
full point lower today than prior to the impact of
the pandemic, and is also a half point lower than

(07:26):
it was in November twenty twenty three. To the point
of the recruiter who submitted today's note, many older Americans
have been unable to find work and has just dropped
out the workforce as a result. So where do we
go from here? Well, the one immovable object in this
conversation is the impact of AI in the workforce. That's
going to take time to sort it out. No guarantees

(07:46):
on where the end results is going to fall. Now,
independent of that dynamic, there is some room for optimism
that we could be on the brink of unleashing new
opportunities based on the Trump administration's cracked down on illegal immigration.
Estimate for the number of new jobs needed monthly to
keep pace with population growth is down from two hundred

(08:07):
and thirty thousand to only twenty five thousand. So that's
what we need. We need twenty five thousand A month
right now, to keep up with population growth in the
United States, you get above that people are out of
work and get back into work, and so that is
actually less than what was reported in the ADP private
sectory port last week, which was fifty four thousand. So

(08:29):
suddenly what uses sound like a week number starts looking
better in this new context. Also, with the Federal Reserve
finally sets to begin cutting interest rates next week, something
that's long to never do, that should act as an
economic tailwind for many companies and especially across interest rates
sensitive industries. So it's always you got two sides of stories,
one side of facts. Those are the facts.