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| I snapped this myself while out walking and considering my next moves. |
I think it is safe to say that looking for a job is not something anyone does for fun. It is also well known that the current market is exceptionally frustrating for job seekers. According to USAfacts.org as of May of 2026 there are 7.59 million jobs open in the U.S. Of those 6.2% are professional or business services and this comes as no surprise to me as I myself am hunting for a job and the amount of Senior and Director positions listed are staggering. According to Stlouisfed.org as of June of 2026 the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.2% or approximately 7.09 million people.
Now come the caveats that most people miss when they hear these numbers: unemployment does not count those who stopped looking, or have enough of a safety net to be missed in the counting. We also have the issue that there are loads and loads of “ghost jobs” and "Scam Postings"in the open classification. If you are unfamiliar with the term “ghost job” those are jobs that are posted by companies but the job actually does not exist most likely to make the company appear to be growing when it isn't. Scam Jobs–I have gotten six out of 33 I have applied to so let's anecdotally say 20%–are postings for say "Acme Toon Supplies" and 12 to 24 hours later you have an e-mail or text from an energy sector or renewable something wanting you to install Telegram, or Signal, then supplies a phone number to contact a "Hiring Manager" via those apps. I was neither born yesterday nor last-night, and have been online since my first email address ended in swbell.net and have some–albeit old–cyber security training so I can see a scam, and no one hires someone in 12 to 24 hours. Now sometimes companies post a jobs because they know someone is coming up on retirement, or it is a high turnover position, but if the retiree does not in fact retire or the people in that high turnover role decide to tough it out and stay, the listing is counted, but like a ghost job there is no actual job for the people trying to get it. I have also found a lot of jobs listed that when you go to apply you get a message that the position is closed because someone forgot to pull the listing down–again inflating the numbers.
No matter what though if every unemployed person were to be hired right now or even tomorrow we would be left with half a million open jobs, and as much as that is an issue for companies it would be great for workers as they could feel more empowered to leave bad employers.
So why is it so hard for people to find work right now since we have more openings than unemployed people? To me it is multifaceted, we have bots or AI crawling resumes now and both make mistakes so a lot of qualified people are probably being rejected by mistake–check the lawsuits on AI and bots in recruiting that are currently ongoing. We have companies turning record profits, with their owners and C-suite execs (C-suite is all the people whose titles start with the letter C like CEO, COO, CFO, etc) raking in major dividends, but have you looked at what they are offering as starting wages? I have seen postings requiring a Bachelor's degree that only offer $18 an hour, that’s a bring home of about $540 a week. The job descriptions occasionally read like they want to hire one person to do three people's worth of work. Then you get the ones where it is obvious they are trying to move someone inside the company into that position as they require years of experience with proprietary software or internal information channels. Job postings also read like a list of buzzwords, acronyms, and industry jargon, not to mention I have seen recipe blogs that were easier to find the recipe in than to find the “required qualifications”–seriously why not lead with that? We don’t need to hear how your company was started by two orphan sisters selling bars of handmade soap along the river in 1898, and how in the 128 years since the company still keeps their core values…and who is proofreading these postings, I make fewer typos and seem to have a better grasp of sentence structure and comma placement! The other issue is what I call “degree inflation” where a company requires a bachelor’s degree for jobs that really don’t need one–usually evident by the aforementioned low starting pay tied to these degrees.
Then we get the white collar vs blue collar divide. Which brings the degree inflation into stark reality because as I mentioned there are a lot of jobs posted that do not actually need a degree, but they require one; why? Is it to keep out the people like me for whom experience has been my teacher? I come from a building maintenance background where I worked my way up to management, and let me tell you it is front facing customer service at its core. It involves resolving issues in real time, maintaining vendor management, scheduling crews, submitting proposals, requesting quotes, requesting proposals for stuff beyond your crew’s abilities, and a lot of data entry. Clear concise communication is at the forefront of keeping customers happy, and you get a lot of experience in that. From this I have great people skills, computer skills, time management, and the ability to shift gears and refocus myself and my teams. To me these skills translate well into many other areas of business administration and customer service, but the problem is bots, AI, and even people don't see that on resumes. All they see is blue collar attributes and they aren't taking the time to consider how those attributes cross over to being in an office. How many people like myself who have been forged in the fires of in person client facing customer service are overlooked because they haven't sat at a desk eight hours a day and done the exact same thing?
In what I hope to be my former field of work, I had to deal with tenants who had flooded kitchens because something broke loose, or who had eight inches of sewage in their basement, and if you want a rightfully confrontational client they had every right to be upset, but it was my job to get them calmed down, my team in, and make things right. Building maintenance is a carefully choreographed dance between proactive and reactive tasks. It means talking someone through how to light a pilot on a furnace or a water-heater at six in the morning on a Saturday, during a snowstorm. It involves working around pets that want to stick their noses into what you are doing. It meant explaining why something happened to a client in such a way they can understand and not feel blamed–even if they actually caused the issue.
It meant the patient teaching of technicians sometimes from the other side of the city via phone, text, pictures and video, when they were in over their heads, but had to fake their way through it to get the job done. Keeping seven people with a diverse set of skills on task, on time, and busy; while knowing each of their strengths and weaknesses. Keeping track of their purchases, ensuring they were getting the correct parts for the task and that those parts were billed to the correct property. It meant training them against harassment, to use their safety gear, how to use new equipment, or just refreshers on equipment that wasn’t used as often. It meant tracking inventory be it consumables or assets such as major tools or the company van, from shelf or shop, to a technician, and back into the system again if it wasn’t a consumable, all while billing that time and wear to the correct property. So there are tons of things that algorithms and even people fail to see in a lot of blue collar people's resumes and thus the divide.
In the end how are we going to fix this? Employers could stop posting ghost jobs. Job boards should have a better way to report scam posts. Hiring managers could make postings easier to read by getting to the point quickly. Stop asking for degrees where they aren’t needed. Actually pay a living wage and post a realistic pay range on the job, if you only want to pay $26 an hour then don’t post $26 to $46 an hour and waste the seeker's time when their experience is worth $45 an hour. And employers need to become more familiar with blue collar jobs and maybe look for the person who has been in the weather for 20 years, has valuable skills and insights, and would like to spend the next 10 to 20 years inside at a desk because their body is done with the physical abuse it has taken for those 20 or more years.
Maura out