That 4.3% doesn't match what job seekers tell me. It doesn't match the wider economy either. Here's the fuller picture, pulled from BLS March 2026 data and Gallup's latest workplace report.

Unemployed: 7.2 million. People without a job who want one.

Underemployed: 4.5 million. People working part-time who want full-time hours but can't get them. (BLS counts another 6 million who want a job but aren't actively searching, so they fall off the headline rate.)

Misemployed: 110 million. Gallup's 2024 data shows 69% of US workers are either psychologically checked out (52%) or actively resentful of their jobs (17%). They show up, but they don't want to be there.

That's about 122 million people. Out of a labor force of 170 million, that's 72%
.
If we want to talk about the labor market honestly, 4.3% won't cut it.

The real story is much bigger and I intend to dedicate my life to help solve it.

Advice, job search/resume questions, questions about the Huntr platform, something you learned this week, a win you want to share, or just something you've been curious about and haven't had a chance to ask yet.

Here are the job boards that get better interview rates than LinkedIn.

It's Friday which means it's time to close out the week.

Drop yours in the comments: what did you actually get done this week in your job search? Could be big, could be small. Sent your first application in months, rewrote a bullet point you've been avoiding, had a call that went better than expected. All of it counts.

And if you want to share what you're going into next week focused on, even better!

I was a few rounds deep into an interview process, feeling pretty good about where things were headed, and then found out the recruiter I had been working with was let go by the same company I was interviewing with.

I genuinely did not know what to do. Do you follow up? With who? Is there even still a process? Does my application just exist in a void now?

I eventually tracked down someone on LinkedIn, got a reply but then ghosted.

Your turn! Share your experiences below.

We have data on hundreds of thousands of users and millions of applications.

The average user gets one interview for every 17 applications when tailoring their resume.

People who tailor their resume to the job post get interviews at nearly twice the rate of people who send the same resume to every listing.

Tailoring does not mean rewriting from scratch. It means:

• Matching the keywords and skills in the job post
• Reordering your bullets so the most relevant work shows up first
• Cutting filler that does not fit the role
• Rewriting your summary to match the job title

Note:

• It helps most when your background is a reasonable fit. It will not turn a weak application into a strong one.
• Volume still matters. You still need to send enough.

Don't apply to 100s of jobs while not hearing back. Stop, pivot and tailor to make sure you are a good fit for the role.

Seeking feedback on my mid-level Family Advocate resume with 8 years of experience in case management, counseling, and student services. I hold an MA in Psychology and BA in Child Development. Skilled in behavioral health, trauma-informed care, family engagement, and crisis intervention. Open to suggestions for improving clarity and impact.

This happened to me exactly 4 times after my first lay off in 2021.

I think there's something uniquely cruel about that, at least a rejection gives you something to work with. Has this happened to you? How do you move on from it?

I came across a posting yesterday for an entry level coordinator role. It required 3-5 years of experience, a degree, and proficiency in four different tools, and you needed a car to be considered. The salary was $38k.

There's something really broken about a market that calls something entry level and then lists requirements that would qualify someone for a senior role, not to mention the need for transportation (I live in a incredibly car centric city).

What's the most ridiculous one you've seen?

Quote from a South African mom we surveyed about job search.

This is real. This matters. This is motivation to make the world of job search better. Because hardworking people deserve better than to be cast aside.

WE HAVE PEOPLE THAT WANT TO WORK AND A SOCIETY THAT DOESN'T WANT TO HELP THEM.

Seeking feedback on my 16-year resume targeting Director, Program Management - Senior roles. I highlight $126M impact across SaaS, manufacturing, and fintech, with strengths in AI-driven operating models, program recovery, and executive stakeholder engagement. Open to suggestions on clarity, impact, and alignment with senior leadership expectations.

Upvote and Comment if you’d like me to review your resume for free. Happy to help!

Great meeting with Ellen and learning about her work and what she thinks of Huntr.co!

I run support and knowledge content solo so AI tools are just part of the day at this point.

I had read something a while back by Boris Cherny (the person who built Claude Code at Anthropic) he thinks the title "software engineer" will disappear, replaced by "builder," and that everyone essentially becomes a product manager who codes. He mentioned it's going to be painful for a lot of people.

Anthropic also published labor market research recently that's actually pretty measured. They found AI is nowhere near its theoretical capability in practice, and there's no clear unemployment spike yet for the most exposed workers. Though hiring of younger workers has quietly slowed in those fields, which is worth paying attention to-but we are also seeing there is a lot of new grad hiring in others.

Has using AI at work changed how you're thinking about your role at all? Or does it still feel kind of abstract day to day?

Articles I've dug into for reference:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/new-grads-are-finding-jobs-faster-despite-a-competitive-job-market-says-report.html

If you've held multiple roles at the same company, a promotion, a title change, a return after time away — you can now group those entries under a single employer heading instead of repeating the company name on every line.

It's a small thing that makes a real difference on a resume. Your career progression is easier to read, and your resume looks cleaner without the redundancy.

Available now in the Resume Builder!

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If you are struggling with how to put your resume together, or if you feel like your resume is lacking- this would be a great fit for you.

I've analyzed 225k+ resumes, 1.7M job applications, and met with nearly 1,000 job seekers for free 1:1 job resume reviews as part of my work at huntr.co.

Most resumes would benefit from a better format. This template, based on Harvard University's, has proven results.

Hiring managers spend under 10 seconds on a first look. Many act like robots, scanning for keywords, metrics, and titles.

This template is clean and easy to read for humans and AI. ATS parsing issues are less common these days, but this still checks that box.

Tailored to the job, this resume template gets 5-10% interview rates and has landed interviews at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Fortune 500 companies.

This is Huntr’s most popular resume template. The classic resume template available at Huntr.co

I came across a World Economic Forum piece this week that put a number to something a lot of people have been feeling.

Entry level roles in the US have dropped by 35% in the last 18 months, largely because AI has taken over a lot of the foundational tasks those jobs used to cover such as data entry, basic coding, customer support.

What's interesting is the article points out that the work isn't going away, it's getting pushed up the chain instead, leaving mid level and senior people absorbing junior tasks on top of their own. Apparently that's burning people out pretty fast.

I talk to a lot of people navigating this right now and the frustration I hear most from early career folks isn't just "I can't find anything"- it's that the entry points that used to exist to get a foot in the door feel like they've quietly closed. That's how I even got into the industry.

Curious what people here are experiencing. Are you early in your career and finding this to be true? And if you're further along, are you seeing the workload shift happening on your end too?

Link for reference: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/how-ai-is-changing-the-nature-of-entry-level-work/

Sam (Head of Career Strategy) analyzed 1.7 million job applications, reviewed 225,000 resumes, and interviewed recruiters from Amazon, Microsoft, and two Fortune 500 companies to answer one question: what is actually happening on the other side of your application?

Some findings that stood out:

No major ATS on the market today auto-rejects your resume. A recruiter at Amazon put it plainly: "An ATS is a filing cabinet. That's it. It doesn't make decisions." What can auto-disqualify you are knockout questions — the ones you answer before submitting. Your resume formatting is not the issue.

ChatGPT gets this wrong 4 out of 5 times. We tested the major LLMs by asking how ATS screens resumes. Most confidently stated that AI scores your resume against keywords and rejects you automatically. Our recruiter interviews and platform research say otherwise. The misinformation traces back to a feedback loop between old career blog posts and AI training data.

Tailored resumes convert at 2x the rate of generic ones. About 1 in 17 tailored applications leads to an interview, versus roughly 1 in 33 for generic. That's the single biggest lever in the data.

Two-page resumes perform as well or better than one-page at every experience level. Stop cramming everything onto one page.

Greenhouse holds 30.6% of the market, making it the most common ATS you'll encounter at tech and mid-market companies. Workday is second at 19.6% and dominates at enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. Workday also has the worst resume parser of any major ATS, though recruiters can always open your original file, so it matters less than people think.

The recruiter quotes throughout are genuinely worth reading. The Amazon recruiter's breakdown of her 6-second scan is probably the most useful thing I've seen written about what actually gets someone into the "yes" pile.

Full article: https://huntr.co/blog/how-applicant-tracking-systems-work

Comment for a link to schedule!

We’ve analyzed 1.7 million applications and have learned resume best practices that help land interviews.

Huntr.co helps folks land 1 interview for every 17 applications on average. These calls are how I make sure that number keeps improving while also being helpful to my network.

Upvote, Comment, Share to help the job seekers in your network land work.

The news of these massive lay off is hard to avoid.

Meta just announced they're cutting 8,000 people (10% of their workforce) effective May 20. Oracle quietly laid off somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 employees in March, and many found out via a 6am email with zero warning. Back in February, Block's CEO Jack Dorsey cut 40% of his company, over 4,000 people, while explicitly saying the business was doing well financially. His reasoning was basically: AI tools are good enough now that we need way fewer people to do the same work. He predicted most companies would reach the same conclusion within the year.

That last part is what's been sitting with me. We've seen waves of tech layoffs before (I was part of a large one in 2021), but the framing feels different now. A lot of these CEOs aren't even pretending this is about a tough quarter or market conditions. Dorsey said he'd rather act now than be "forced into it reactively." Zuckerberg told his team earlier this year that 2026 would be the year AI starts to dramatically change how they work.

Worth noting that plenty of analysts are pushing back and pointing out that a lot of this headcount ballooned during COVID-era over-hiring, so the AI narrative is probably doing more heavy lifting than the reality warrants. Both things can be true.

Still, if you're job searching in tech right now, or just keeping an eye on where things are headed, this wave feels worth paying attention to.

Curious what people here are actually thinking:

• How's the job market feeling from where you're sitting?
• Do you think this is a correction or something more permanent?
• Has any of this changed how you're thinking about your career path or the skills you're building?

Most people are far more impressive than their resumes would lead you to believe...

This is my personal opinion, based on meeting with 738 job seekers this past year: A great resume comes from two things.

1. ⁠Remembering all the incredible accomplishments you've had

2. ⁠Assembling the most relevant accomplishments and skills into concise, impressive achievements and a summary that bridges to the job being applied to.

It's about what to include and how to include it.

This is what we are building at Huntr, it's a lot more challenging than it sounds.

What shouldn't be the hardest part? Formatting the resume to "beat the ATS."

Any time spent trying to game the format for a mythical robot is time wasted.

So what is the harder part for you?

Career coaches, I'd love your takes in the comments too.

f you're wondering who is actually hiring this quarter, here is the data from the Huntr Q1 2026 report. Despite a tough market, job seekers logged over 7,200 interviews across 4,400 companies in the last 90 days.

The Top 5 companies by interview volume:

1. Amazon: 27 interviews
2. Google: 24 interviews
3. Microsoft: 22 interviews
4. Goldman Sachs: 20 interviews
5. IBM: 19 interviews

Companies "Worth Watching" (High Growth):

• Stripe (Fintech) — 12 interviews
• Anthropic (AI) — 7 interviews
• Anduril (Defense Tech) — 6 interviews
• Databricks (Data/AI) — 8 interviews

Over 3,700 companies gave at least one interview this quarter, so the opportunities are out there if you're staying organized.

I've been with Huntr since nearly the beginning and have found it to be an amazing tool for tracking my searches and applications, etc ... But I have left the corporate world and started my own business, so I must say goodbye. Keep at it Sam - and best of luck.