The 'No Hire' Economy

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Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below:Subscribe nowBy subscribing, you’ll join over 75,000 people who read Apricitas!The US job market slowed down significantly in the latter half of 2025, with the country adding functionally zero jobs over the last 5 months as the unemployment rate ticked up to some of the highest levels since early 2021. Averaged across the entirety of 2025, the US added only 44k jobs per month, the lowest since 2020 and lower than any year during the 2010s. It’s a dramatic reversal for a labor market that was setting modern hiring records only a few years ago.In 2021 and 2022, the US economy experienced the “Great Resignation” (or perhaps more accurately the “Great Reshuffling”), where tens of millions of workers quit their jobs and were hired into better-paid positions in other companies. Then, between 2023 and 2024, the US economy settled into a “low hire, low fire” equilibrium as employers were not onboarding many new workers, but were also laying off fewer workers than pre-pandemic. That has now given way to a “no-hire” economy—layoffs have inched up towards their pre-pandemic average, but hiring has sunk all the way down to 2013 levels.Throughout this period, the unemployment rate has crept up from a low of 3.4% in late 2023 to a recent high of 4.5% set in November 2025. Looking at broader measures of underemployment—including people who want a job but aren’t in the labor force or who are part-time but want a full-time job—the job market is in nearly the worst place since the early pandemic, with roughly 10.8% …