Tequila Turner collected her last regular paycheck in October 2024. Since then she's traded her steady career in corporate IT for freelance projects and gig work, like delivering for DoorDash.

Her income plummeted from six figures to a fraction of that last year, she tells me over the phone between making deliveries. She moved in with friends to save money. And she's been hard at work looking for a new job — but so far, no real luck.

Turner, 47, says she lost her job over a year ago when her contract role with a bank ended. The Kansas City, Missouri, resident is part of the growing share of Americans who are not only unemployed but have been looking for work for six months or more, making them what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as "long-term unemployed."

Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people.

But the share of people who've been out of work for six-plus months has been rising for the last three years. Typically, long-term unemployment has gone down after the job market recovers following recessionary shocks like the pandemic or Great Recession.

Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they've also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person's previous income.

In today's challenging hiring environment, stories like Turner's are becoming more common.

The pool of job opportunities has been shrinking for a while: Job openings, hiring and voluntary quits (which signal workers' confidence in being able to get a new job) have been sliding since the post-pandemic hiring boom of 2022.

Meanwhile, U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025 (compared to 1.46 million in 2024), and businesses announced 108,435 layoffs in January.

These compounding factors mean those looking for a job are having a harder time landing one.

Businesses are no longer adding jobs and are slowly trimming their workforce to correct for over-hiring directly after the pandemic recession, says Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at career site ZipRecruiter.

"The moment we're in right now in labor is stagnation across the board for workers and for employers," she says. While workers moved jobs (and even quit on their own) after other recessions like the 2008 financial crisis or Covid-19 pandemic, today they're staying put.

"Unemployment is becoming more of a status quo versus a temporary position for workers who find themselves out of their job," Bachaud says.

People who've been out of work long-term tell CNBC Make It the experience has chipped away at their confidence and made them question their career decisions. Some have taken on part-time work to pay for bills, while others have moved in with family.

They say they're doing everything by the job-searching playbook, and even trying new methods, but still nothing seems to be working.

The tough hiring market is hitting certain demographics hard, including young professionals.

Chris Fong, 25, says he thought it wouldn't be too hard to find a job when he was laid off from a startup in March 2025. He went to a top-tier university, did well at his previous jobs and lives in the Bay Area, a major job market.

But in the months since, Fong says he's noticed a drop in entry-level jobs, and he's often competing with candidates with more years of experience or higher graduate degrees than him.

Fong's observations reflect a larger trend: Entry-level job postings were down by about 35% in mid-2025 compared to January 2023, according to research from Revelio Labs.

He's also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get "more picky," he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn't get the role.

Fong says he's been living on savings and recently took up a part-time job working at a friend's film rental gear company. It's minimum wage but helps pay the bills. In January, he started documenting his unemployment journey on Instagram as a creative outlet and to regain control of his life and career story.

"I was tired of letting these recruiters and companies judge me based off my previous experience" on a resume, he says. "I was like, 'I'm going to start something myself.'"

Some recent grads say changing immigration policies add stress to their search.

Sakshi Patel, 22, earned her master's degree in financial management in May 2025. She's currently volunteering at a nonprofit as a business analyst, but as an international student from India needs to find employment by the spring in order to stay in the U.S.

Now, she's worried new policies, like the Trump administration's revamping the H1-B visa program and adding a $100,000 application fee, will mean companies won't be looking to hire international students who need visa sponsorship like her.

Patel says she's trying everything to get hired: She lives in Boston but will relocate anywhere and is open to jobs not related to her major. She estimates she sends 30 to 40 tailored applications per week but rarely hears back.

"Long-term unemployment is still talked about a personal shortcoming when in reality it's increasingly a structural issue," she adds. "A lot of people are doing everything they're supposed to be doing and still not getting work."

Myriam Samake laments the lack of transparency in hiring today. When she landed her job as a multimedia news journalist in 2023, she'd contacted the news director on LinkedIn, set up two phone interviews, and had a gig lined up after grad school. The contract role ended in June 2025.

The 27-year-old in Sterling, Virginia, keeps an Excel spreadsheet with all of her applications in the last seven months, which is 150 roles and counting, including getting to final interviews for two roles but no offers. One company completely ghosted her, she says.

"It's at that point where if I did get an offer, I would take it 100%," she says. "It's sad in a way, where I don't know if we can be as picky anymore."

In another sign of the challenging job-seeker market, more workers are making a lateral move or taking a pay cut for a new job, and the share of new hires who say they landed their "dream job" is down, according to ZipRecruiter data from the final months of 2025.

Samake says she doesn't have high hopes to land hers. "I'm trying to look for places that have diversity. I am a Black woman, and that's important to me," she says. "Do I have to lower my expectations on that or the salary I want? Do I have to knock off $5,000, $10,000 and accept a lower salary just to get my foot in the door?"

Like many job seekers, Samake is frustrated with the state of applying to jobs online and never really knowing if the materials she pours over make it to a human reviewer. In mid-2025, the average job opening received 242 applications, or three times the average in 2017, according to Greenhouse data reported by Business Insider.

"It's such a mental war," Samake says.

Even experienced workers are having a hard time. Greg Roth, 52, remembers back in 2022 getting to final interviews with four companies and securing two competing offers. The D.C.-based executive communications professional joined Thumbtack, the home repair marketplace, in June 2022, but by December was laid off along with 14% of the company. 

He resumed looking for a full-time job in 2024 but says interviews are hard to come by. "In a short amount of time I've gone from feeling very in-demand to feeling completely ignored," Roth says. "My skills haven't changed, so either the market has changed, or there's just less hiring."

Both are likely, says Bachaud, the ZipRecruiter economist. Businesses have been scaling back on hiring due to a number of economic factors (like high interest rates and stubborn inflation), political challenges (like new tariff policies) and shifting business objectives (like investments in AI), Bachaud says.

And now, the supply of job seekers it outpacing demand in hiring: As of December, there were roughly 1 million more people looking for work than there were available jobs, according to BLS data analyzed by Indeed.

Andrew Bohan says one of the hardest parts of dealing with long-term unemployment isn't just the constant rejection, but also not have a satisfying answer when people ask how the search is going.

Bohan lost his paralegal job in August 2024, exhausted his unemployment insurance benefits in March 2025, and in January 2026 moved from Chicago to Baltimore to live with family and keep bills low.

"I like to tell people being unemployed isn't the problem; it's keeping your head screwed on that's the real problem," he says. He says he can feel pressure to "prove" he's being proactive about his circumstances among friends and family, though that's hard to show without the results of interviews or offers.

Losing a job can have long-term impacts: Research has shown that losing a job is associated with declines in psychological and physical wellbeing, social withdrawal and long-term earning losses. Other studies have shown people who experience unemployment tend to get new jobs earning about 5% to 15% less than similar workers who did not lose their jobs.

Bohan, who's recently applied to hourly service jobs to no avail, tries not to be too pessimistic about his situation. Otherwise it shows up in his interactions, from recruiters to friends and family. "You just have to focus on what's in front of you and what you can do about it," he says.

That can be as simple as getting a good night's rest in order to be ready to apply to new jobs the next day, Bohan says: "I don't like being idle. I want to get back into the game."

Turner, the risk management worker in Kansas City, hopes long-term job seekers recognize that it takes a lot of self care and encouragement to not internalize the challenges of unemployment.

To those who do have jobs or know others struggling with the search, "I wish people knew this is not a choice," Turner says. "It's new to us. These are people who've provided for their families and themselves for their entire lives."

Many job seekers, like Turner, have years of work experience and valuable skills they've earned over their careers, she says. Now they just need the opportunity to showcase that to an employer, she says: "We want to do the work."

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