For Ron Sliter, getting a master's degree seemed like a path to job security. After spending nearly two decades in the military, including eight tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he attended graduate school with the help of the GI Bill and landed a job in IT administration. He looked forward to climbing the corporate ladder and enjoying a long, successful career in the civilian world.

Then, in January 2023, he got laid off. Since then, he's applied to thousands of roles — to no avail. After more than two years, he's still unemployed. The whole experience, he says, feels like "being caught in the middle of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'"

"It's disheartening," he tells me. "They sell you on the dream, you fight for the dream, and you come back to take advantage of the dream that you fought for. And you realize it doesn't exist."

Sliter is part of a sudden spike in the number of highly educated professionals who are struggling to find a job — any job. According to government data analyzed by the economist Aaron Terrazas, professionals with advanced degrees who are looking for work find themselves stranded on the unemployment line for a median of 18 weeks — a jobless spell that has more than quadrupled over the past two years. And in a strange twist, job searches are now taking more than twice as long for educated elites than they are for workers who never went to college. At the moment, the higher your degree, the longer it will take for you to find a job.

It's not news that we're in the midst of a sharp downturn in tech and finance — one that has hit highly credentialed professionals especially hard. I've been calling it a white-collar recession, assuming that it's temporary. It's normal, after all, to experience dips in the job market. There have been plenty of times over the years when Ph.D. holders faced longer job searches than high school graduates. But whatever the ups and downs, education — particularly an advanced degree — has generally provided a good buffer against financial insecurity.

Lately, though, I've started to wonder if what we're seeing in the job market is a sign of something deeper. What if Sliter's protracted spell of joblessness is an early warning signal — an indication that the economy is undergoing a fundamental shift? What if, going forward, education no longer provides a path to economic security the way it once did?

"For 40 years, we've been talking about how more education leads to better labor market outcomes," says Terrazas, the former chief economist for Glassdoor. "Suddenly, that feels like it's changing." And the shift, he warns, could herald a profound "moment of dislocation" for today's white-collar professionals, just as blue-collar workers faced a seismic reckoning in the wake of globalization.

"What the early 2000s were for manufacturing workers, I worry that the mid-2020s are going to be for knowledge workers," Terrazas says. "American manufacturing workers were told they were highly productive until global trade opened up, and then suddenly that changed. I worry that we're in a comparable moment for knowledge workers. They were told they were the most productive workers in the world. Suddenly that's being undermined."

Education has long served as a ticket to a better, more secure life. But rarely has it mattered more than in recent decades, with the rise of robots and computers and the internet. The more schooling you had, the more likely you were to survive the sudden technological disruption. Between 1980 and 2009, the economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor found, wages increased modestly for those with a bachelor's degree, soared for those with an advanced degree, and tumbled for high school dropouts. Economists gave the phenomenon an awkward name: skill-biased technological change. In plainspeak: Get more degrees or you're screwed. Education was the one thing that kept you safe in an increasingly cutthroat economy.

To secure their futures, an unprecedented number of young Americans enrolled in graduate schools, taking out big loans that they believed would yield even bigger payoffs down the road. Since 2000, the numbers of Americans with master's degrees and doctorates have more than doubled — while the ranks of those without a high school diploma shrank.

But then, over the past few years, the demand for super-educated professionals suddenly took a deep dive. A variety of factors have combined to alter the white-collar landscape. The first was the pandemic-driven shift to remote work. No longer limited by the constraints of geography, American companies realized they could hire abroad, giving them access to a larger and cheaper pool of highly trained professionals. Suddenly, homegrown computer scientists, product managers, and data scientists — long treated as rare diamonds worthy of their high salaries — seemed more like overpriced commodities compared with their counterparts overseas.

Another factor has been the big push among corporate recruiters to de-emphasize formal credentials in the hiring process, a trend known as "skills-based hiring." Some employers no longer list degree requirements in job postings; others have added the qualifier "or equivalent experience." That's giving people without the extra schooling a chance at landing the most coveted white-collar jobs — while undercutting the advantage long enjoyed by the advanced-degree holders.

And then there's AI. As I've written before, studies show that chatbots and other AI tools are already providing a boost to those with the least skill and experience, while doing little to help high performers — the very people who likely got an advanced degree to hone their skills. What's more, early estimates suggest that in the long run, AI is most likely to displace white-collar professionals, while leaving most blue-collar jobs intact. And besides, getting an MBA or some other advanced degree didn't exactly prepare anyone for the sudden emergence of ChatGPT. The faster technology changes, the faster your fancy degree is likely to feel outdated. Terrazas found that the median age for those experiencing long-term unemployment is now 37 — meaning you don't have to be a boomer to feel like technology has passed you by.

"What we think of as 'old' is a lot younger now," Terrazas says. "With the accelerated technical frontier, what it means to be out of date is creeping downward."

That's what happened to a millennial I'll call Tara. After earning her MBA from Cornell University in 2021, she was confident that all the hard work — and expense — was going to pay off. With a job offer from Amazon in hand, she moved across the country to Seattle, excited to live on her own for the first time and begin a brand-new career as a product manager. Whatever happened with the job, she figured there would always be plenty of companies eager to hire someone with a business degree from a top school.

Then Tara got laid off during the tech downturn in November 2023 — and hasn't been able to land a new role. Unemployed for 14 months and counting, she's applied to something like 650 jobs. "With every passing month, as my stress levels went up, my search criteria expanded," she tells me. "I'm stumped at just how hard it's been."

Professionals with advanced degrees aren't just mired in longer job searches — they're facing what feels like a vicious circle: The longer they're out of work, the more obsolete their skills become, which in turn makes it even harder to find a job. As they grow increasingly dejected, some opt for lower-paying roles; others give up altogether. Economists refer to this as "scarring," and it's one of the reasons they worry so much about long-term unemployment. It doesn't just hurt the people who can't find work. It also hurts the broader economy.

The prospects for educated elites are so bleak that some have taken to hiding the credentials they worked so hard to earn. Scott Catey, a policy director who has both a JD and a Ph.D., says he sometimes leaves out the doctorate in job applications, to avoid being viewed as overqualified. Michael Borsellino, who has a doctorate in urban studies, started listing his degree as being in "social sciences," to make it sound applicable to a wider range of jobs. The goal, he says, is "not to pigeonhole myself."

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the modern economy has been dividing up the workforce into ever-narrower specializations. A driving force in higher education, in fact, was to cultivate the sort of hyper-niche expertise that the marketplace demanded. But Terrazas says we're now starting to see the darker side of becoming really, really good at one thing. "Specialization can create productivity-enhancing high returns," he says. "But it can also create obsolescence."

Borsellino, who eventually landed a role at LinkedIn after a nine-month search, doesn't think his Ph.D. proved to be an asset. "If it did help, I feel like I wouldn't have been unemployed for as long as I was," he says. "I don't know if it was a drain, but I don't think it was the end-all, be-all that I grew up believing it would be." If he were thinking about getting a doctorate today, he's not sure he'd do it. "I think we're at this point where experience is valued so much more that it's really, really difficult to justify doing the degree."

Advanced-degree holders, of course, continue to be the economy's overwhelming winners. Most of them are gainfully employed, with salaries that are typically far higher than anyone else's. And it's possible that the current hiring obstacles facing educated professionals will prove to be a temporary blip, just one more twist in a deeply strange pandemic-era economy that we've failed to understand time and time again.

But if I'm right, and this turns out to be the beginning of an enduring trend, it will force us to rethink our long-standing assumptions about education and employment. If even a Ph.D. can't keep us safe from economic catastrophe, what will? That's the question that I find deeply unsettling, especially as we face the uncertainty and upheaval of the AI revolution. Yes, it's always been unfair that those who can afford to keep going to school face better prospects than their less-educated peers. But at least there was some kind of road map to financial security, a rule of thumb that told you how to get to higher ground. There was comfort in that predictability.

Catey, the JD-Ph.D., counts himself among the lucky ones. While he continues his search for a full-time job, he's been able to land enough freelance work to get by. And he doesn't have to worry about paying off his student loans, because they were forgiven by the Biden administration. But being without a full-time job for almost a year wasn't exactly the life he envisioned back when he was slogging his way through grad school.

"Credentialing seemed to me a very solid way to make sure I had a reliable future of employment in front of me," he says. "That's not how it turned out."

Andy Kiersz contributed analysis.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

At this point, it's become so common it's a social media cliché: the post-layoff note on LinkedIn. Overly polite and awkwardly upbeat, the freshly unemployed thank their ex-employer for a great few years and highlight all the great things they did there. I'm looking forward to the next challenge, they write, adding the #opentowork hashtag. Please reach out if your company is hiring. Every time a big company makes a round of cuts, I see a few of these pop up in my feed.

But last week, when Meta culled some 4,000 workers, I expected total silence. Mark Zuckerberg had announced that the cuts were designed to get rid of "low performers," burdening the departing employees with the professional equivalent of a scarlet letter. I felt terrible for them. No one, I thought, would want to call attention to the fact that they'd been branded as below average.

Boy, was I wrong.

Within a day, laid-off Meta employees were taking to LinkedIn — not just to announce they were looking for work, but to fight back against Zuckerberg's assessment of their work. It was a new iteration of the classic #opentowork post, ditching the deference for a tone of defiance.

"I am not a low performer," a content manager wrote. "I am an adaptive hard worker who thrives in work that I can be passionate about." A product designer asserted: "That label is misleading, and for many of us, it's flat-out wrong." A lawyer — deriding what she called "Zuck's newfound 'masculine energy'" — offered to provide the receipts: "I'm not a 'low performer.' I've got the reviews to prove it, and countless colleagues and managers will vouch for me!" A data scientist even uploaded screenshots of his glowing performance reviews, which indicated he routinely "exceeded expectations" and "greatly exceeded expectations."

This is something we haven't seen before in the professional world: Employees sticking up for themselves in public, and calling out their former employer for misrepresenting their work. When LinkedIn introduced the #opentowork feature during the early days of the pandemic, it was a tall order to get people to announce that they'd been laid off. In the past, people usually kept their dismissal private, fearing the stigma would prevent them from getting another job.

That began to change in late 2022, when a huge round of layoffs hit the tech sector. Suddenly, tens of thousands of coders, product managers, and marketers found themselves out of a job all at once. Some of their CEOs went out of their way to apologize for overhiring, and to praise their axed staffers as great employees. That encouraged people to use the #opentowork banner to announce that they'd been laid off. Last summer, when I spoke with corporate recruiters about the trend, most told me it no longer gave them pause to see that a candidate had been laid off. They'd come to understand that it doesn't automatically cast doubt on someone's performance.

Now, Meta's employees are taking that realization to the next level. The groundswell of defiance started last year, when a handful of people posted videos of themselves on TikTok as they received the news of their layoffs. The most viral was Brittany Pietsch, a Cloudflare employee who kept asking the HR person for evidence of her supposed low performance. The videos were uncomfortable, but I found it refreshing to watch these young people tell their side of the story. Similarly, the new crop of #opentowork posts is enabling Meta's employees to assert their value in the marketplace — using social media, the very thing Zuckerberg helped supercharge, to counter the narrative he's telling about the layoffs. "While we can't do anything about being laid off," a Meta research manager posted on LinkedIn, "we aren't without any agency."

The question is: Will standing up to your former boss hurt your chances of landing a new job? The standard advice for laid-off workers is to avoid saying anything negative about their former employers, both on social media and in job interviews. Ashley Herd, a former head of HR who founded a firm that provides training for managers, acknowledges that speaking up might turn off some potential employers. But getting rejected by them, she adds, might not be a bad thing.

"Good employers are looking for people who are good communicators — who can advocate for themselves just like they would in their role for the organization," Herd says. "Those that speak up might realistically find themselves with a smaller pool of potential employers, but that will be a group that actually aligns with their values and supports long-term career success and happiness."

Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies layoffs, agrees that it's good for employees to stick up for themselves. "I don't think it's a mistake," she tells me. "As soon as you've got the CEO of my company saying, 'I'm laying off people because they're no good at their job,' reasonable people are going to say, 'Do I accept that or do I try to change the narrative here?'"

If that's their goal, Meta's employees seem to be succeeding. People have begun to question the "low performer" label that Zuckerberg has been throwing around. When those who were laid off start sending out their résumés, recruiters will likely have heard that the purge included a lot of employees with excellent performance reviews. Besides, the defiant posts are proving to be a good way to kick off a job search: Many of the comments on LinkedIn are filled with warm endorsements from ex-colleagues and networking offers from total strangers. This, ironically, was always the power of social media, as Zuckerberg championed it — the promise of "connecting people" and "building community." When it comes to making good on the company's slogans, Meta's former employees have proven themselves to be high performers.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

How excited are you about your job these days? If you're feeling pretty bleh, you're right in line with most of your colleagues. Every year, Gallup surveys tens of thousands of Americans about their jobs, and the latest results reveal an exceptionally bummed-out workforce. Only 31% were engaged at work last year — the grouchiest reading in a decade.

That alone is worrying news for employers, who need their armies to be motivated. But there's an even more alarming detail in the report: The slump is driven by a deep disillusionment among young employees. That's a startling development, given that eager-eyed rookies are usually much more enthusiastic about their jobs than grizzled veterans. In fact, morale among those under 35 has tanked so much that they're now less engaged than their older colleagues — an inversion that hasn't happened since 2007.

The question is why. Two years ago, when the engagement gap first began to narrow, I argued that the main driver was likely the sudden spike in working from home. You'd think Gen Z would be the most remote-friendly generation, but survey after survey shows that 20-somethings actually have the lowest preference for working from home five days a week. Fresh out of school, they're more likely to rely on the office to make friends. They're also in need of the most mentoring, which doesn't happen as much over Zoom. Left to flail on their own, I concluded, they're less enthusiastic about their jobs.

Since my original story, though, I've begun to wonder if other factors are playing a role. For starters, the workplace feels increasingly chaotic and unfriendly these days. Employers have initiated deep layoffs, ordered remote workers to return to the office, and eliminated DEI programs designed to make work feel more equitable and inclusive. The whiplash has sown confusion: In Gallup's survey, only 40% of those under 35 say they know what's expected of them at work.

Adding to the uncertainty is the rise of AI. In a separate survey released this month, Gallup found that 78% of adults under 30 think AI will have a negative impact on job opportunities, compared with only 45% of those 65 and older. Such anxieties are bound to be demoralizing: If you think chatbots are going to usurp your job, why put in the effort to get better at it?

But I suspect that the biggest factor fueling Gen Z's engagement slump is something deeper than all of the turmoil of the past few years. What if young people are simply more clear-eyed than older generations about what they can expect from their jobs — and what work can't provide them? Maybe it's not that they're lazy or entitled. Maybe they're just unwilling to endure all the shitty stuff that comes with a job in return for an elusive payoff decades down the road.

Of course, work has always been a drag — difficult, dull, and demanding. That's why they call it work. But for previous generations, there were enticements that made the daily grind seem worth it. For boomers, the prize was a lifetime of job security. For Gen Xers, it was the prestige of a corner office. For millennials, it was fulfilling your true potential and making the world a better place. Whatever their dreams, each generation worked for years before they discovered that the rewards they'd been promised in return for their effort often turned out to be a mirage.

Gen Zers, on the other hand, seem to have grasped the transactional nature of work from the very outset. They don't have any of the naive expectations about employment that I did when I was their age. They've seen their parents work for years in soul-deadening jobs, only to wind up without enough to retire. They get that hustle culture is a one-way ticket to burnout. And they know that no amount of putting up with shit at work will protect them from being shitcanned. They're disengaged at work because they don't trust that they'll be rewarded for working.

That's why so many Gen Zers are focused on side hustles: They're so fed up with their employers that they'd rather be their own boss. It also explains why they're captivated by FIRE, the viral movement that's short for financial independence, retire early. Just a few years into their careers, they're already dreaming of the day they'll be free of them.

So what should employers do, given Gen Z's startling level of disengagement? First off, don't order everyone back to the office. As I wrote two years ago, research shows that RTO edicts only demoralize everyone even more. Instead, employers need to be more intentional about designing jobs to meet the needs of their junior staff. They can't leave things like mentoring and networking to chance, the way they did when the office forced everyone into proximity. They also need to provide employees with more predictability and stability, rather than swinging from extreme to extreme the way they've been doing with remote work and diversity initiatives. And to ease the AI anxieties of their young employees, companies should focus on implementing technology that assists their staff, as opposed to replacing them altogether.

All of these steps would help. But to truly engage their youngest workers, companies need to give them a concrete reason to be excited about their jobs. They can shape assignments to each employee's interests and goals as much as possible, and ways to vary the tasks within each role, so an employee isn't stuck doing the same thing over and over. They can crack down on toxic managers, and offer employees a little more freedom to choose how they do their jobs. And they can cultivate a corporate culture that encourages even entry-level employees to contribute ideas and provide feedback — something that will happen only if managers actually listen to everyone's input.

This isn't about catering to the whims of Gen Z. These are the tried-and-true ways, backed by decades of rigorous research, to create more engaging jobs for everyone, regardless of age. Making jobs more interesting will motivate the entire workforce. And there's nothing fluffy about making employees happy: A disengaged workforce is linked to all kinds of factors that hurt companies, including higher turnover, lower profits, and even customer dissatisfaction. Last year, Gallup estimated that low engagement is already costing businesses $9 trillion a year in lost productivity worldwide. If companies don't do something soon to address the brewing disengagement crisis, that's going to wind up feeling like chump change.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

For millions of Americans who have grown accustomed to the flexibility provided by their work-from-home arrangements, it's been a gloomy start to the year. As of this month, employees at Amazon and AT&T are required to start showing up in the office five days a week. Then, on Tuesday, news broke that JPMorgan is preparing to revoke the hybrid privileges of about 40% of its workforce. (The other 60% are already required to come in every day). The headlines, the latest in a steady stream of return-to-office announcements, sparked yet another round of freakouts on Reddit, LinkedIn, and countless group texts. But as someone who keeps a close watch on the American workplace, I can tell you that I'm really not worried about the future of working from home. Whatever old-school CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Andy Jassy may think of it, remote work is here to stay.

For one, take a look at the stats. The economist Nick Bloom runs a monthly survey of American workers that tracks the prevalence of remote work. At the peak of COVID, in the spring of 2020, as much as 62% of work across the economy was being done from home. As the pandemic eased, that number came tumbling down — to 37% at the beginning of 2021, 33% in 2022, and 27% in 2023. The work-from-home dream appeared to be fading.

But in the two years since, something odd has happened. Despite all the headlines about companies getting rid of hybrid arrangements, the actual prevalence of remote work has barely budged. Last month, the share of work-from-home jobs remained at 27%. The RTO wars, it seems, have reached an impasse — one in which neither side is able to score any gains.

This impasse is all the more remarkable because of the weakness of the white-collar job market. As I've reported, hiring for corporate professionals has been in a huge slump, which has given employers the upper hand to do whatever they want about remote work without risking a mass exodus of disgruntled staffers. If CEOs were waiting for the ideal market conditions to drag everyone back into the office, this would definitely be the time to do it.

And yet, as the data shows, that hasn't happened — which suggests that CEOs, for the most part, are fine with the policies they have in place today. Even if they quietly wish more employees would come into the office, they don't seem to think it's worth the disruption that would come from forcing the issue.

In fact, when you zoom out and look at the current status of work from home, what you see is nothing short of a sea change. In 2019, Bloom and his team estimate, only 4.7% of work was performed from home. That means the current level of WFH is still six times larger than it was before the pandemic. For all the Amazons and JPMorgans that are reverting to their pre-COVID policies, the norm remains tilted to hybrid work to a degree that would have been unimaginable back in 2019.

In the long run, despite the RTO efforts by the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan, I actually think working from home is almost certain to become even more common. First, given America's slowing population growth, employers will soon find themselves facing a serious labor shortage. That will force them to offer all kinds of perks to attract and retain staff — and the flexibility to work from home is sure to be one of them. Second, the WFH-friendly startups that were founded during the pandemic will continue to grow. They'll not only employ more and more remote and hybrid employees — they'll eventually come to dominate entire sectors of the economy, further cementing the value of work from home. And third, the technology that enables us to collaborate at a distance will only get better over time, reducing what's probably the biggest pain point of remote work.

That's all to say that the reports of remote work's death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. After all, this is how big societal changes always happen: first comes innovation, then skepticism and fear, followed by a concerted push to return to the good old days. In the scheme of things, the office itself is a relatively recent innovation. Or consider one of the biggest inventions of Twain's time: the telephone. What was wrong with the telegraph, people asked. What's the point of switching to this new thing? Also, could it transmit ghosts? Could the electrical wiring shock you? Even as the devices proliferated, some worried that they portended the downfall of society. "The general use of the telephone," one New York Times writer lamented, "instead of promoting civility and courtesy, is the means of the fast dying out of what little we have left."

That's how laughable all the corporate hand-wringing about work from home is going to sound like a couple decades from now. Remote work, Jamie Dimon once groused, "doesn't work." History is in the process of proving him wrong.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

Never in the history of work has anyone actually enjoyed looking for it. But the frustration, exhaustion, anxiety, anger, and despondence I've heard from white-collar job seekers over the past year have been unlike anything I've encountered in my 15 years of reporting on the economy. They went to good schools. They worked at reputable companies. They've looked for jobs before, and they thought they knew the drill. But now, in the current job market, they're utterly baffled. None of their tried-and-true approaches to the job hunt seem to work anymore. It's as if they went to sleep in one world and woke up in a scarier one.

In a sense, they have. We're in the midst of a deep white-collar recession, which is generating more unemployed professionals than job openings. And technology has simplified job applications to a single click, flooding employers with way more candidates than they can possibly hope to process. Those two forces have combined to create the mother of all traffic jams, breaking the job market as we know it. Sticking with the same old job-search techniques is a surefire recipe for disappointment. "Do not just apply and hope to get a callback," says Kyle Minton, a longtime recruiter in tech and manufacturing. "I promise you are being buried. We are living in a new age."

But there are ways you can break through the gridlock. To assemble the best job-search advice, I spoke with two dozen experts — recruiters, HR executives, career coaches, résumé writers, and those who run applicant tracking systems and job boards. I asked them for every pro tip they could think of, for every stage of the hiring process — the kind of insider insights they would offer their best friend. They debunked common myths, explained the mindset of recruiters and hiring managers, and provided specific tools for getting ahead. Taken together, their advice offers a concrete guide for navigating the chaos of today's job market. Call them the new rules for job searching — a blueprint for standing out in a world that makes you feel like giving up. "In this environment," Minton says, "I cannot stress enough how imperative it is to go above and beyond."

LAY THE GROUNDWORK

Start by looking within.
If you're still employed, don't assume that the only good jobs are outside your current company. According to data from Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system, internal applicants are five times likelier to land a job than external applicants who have a referral — and 41 times likelier than external applicants without a referral. To get a leg up on your competition, scout out jobs at your company before they're publicly posted. Invite colleagues who are doing the job you want out for coffee and ask them to let you know if they hear of any openings on their team. Networking begins at home.

Make a list of your dream companies.
Given how terrible the job market is, you might assume it's best to play the volume game — to spray and pray, as they say in the marketing business. But that's exactly the wrong approach. Paradoxically, the fact that the market is bad right now means you have to be extra intentional about narrowing your scope. If you're at the entry level, then yes — apply for everything in sight. But if you've got more than a few years of experience, you need to start by thinking hard about the companies you actually want to work for, because you're going to funnel a lot of your time and energy into landing a job at those places.

Keep the list short.
Matt Tague, a tech recruiter turned career consultant, tells his clients to aim for a surprisingly short list of five dream employers, max. "It takes a lot of time to properly research a company," he says. "More dream companies = lower quality research."

Don't be afraid to cold call.
Look at the companies on your list and identify the managers running the teams you hope to join. Even if there are no job openings posted, message the managers and ask to have a quick call with them. The goal is not to ask them for a job — it's to learn about their team and establish a rapport. Not sure what to say? Try using this sample DM created by Tague:

Enlist the help of everyone you know.
Friends. Former colleagues. Neighbors. College classmates. Dog park acquaintances. That guy you met in line for coffee two months ago at that really boring industry conference. Everyone.

GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER ON LINKEDIN

Embrace the cringe.
No one wants to be that person who spends all their time on LinkedIn. But keeping an active presence on the platform is essential: Recruiters and hiring managers rely on it, both to search for candidates and to evaluate applicants. Post and comment frequently — that shows you're engaged in your career and available to respond to a recruiter's DM in a timely manner. And buy a Premium Career subscription. It costs $29.99 a month, and it gives you more messaging credits. You'll need them for all the networking you'll be doing.

Smash that subscribe button.
Remember that list of dream companies you made? Make sure you follow every single one of them on LinkedIn. Recruiters often filter for people who already follow the company, so this is an easy way to make sure you pop up on their radar. "It shows a bit more of that initiative, that resourcefulness, that motivation," says Jenny Diani, a senior director of global technical recruiting at Autodesk. "We want to look at who's really motivated and interested in working at our company."

Optimize your profile with these 4 simple tricks.

1. List your skills. Recruiters want to see more than job titles. Choose five skills to highlight in each job you've had.
2. Fill in the "About" section. Yes, it really matters. Summarize your key qualifications and list the top five skills that are most relevant to the kind of role you want to land.
3. Make the visuals pop. First impressions are key. Post a good headshot, set a cover photo, and make sure the logos of your employers show up.
4. Hide your age. Age discrimination sucks, but it's real. If you're over 40, don't specify the year you graduated from college.

Let your Open to Work flag fly.
Worried recruiters will think something's wrong with you if you use LinkedIn's green banner to signal your availability? Think again. Recruiters not only don't mind #opentowork, but some even prioritize candidates who use it. So turn it on — and then post about it. Do's: articulate the kind of role you want; highlight your skills and key accomplishments; be positive. Don'ts: disparage your previous employer or former colleagues; mention your fear of losing your house.

PUNCH UP YOUR RÉSUMÉ

Hire a professional résumé writer.
"I don't think anybody came out of the womb good at writing a résumé," says Jon Stross, a cofounder of Greenhouse. So hire an expert who knows how to do it right. Prices range from a few hundred dollars for a basic makeover to a few thousand dollars for help with networking strategy and interview prep. I've spoken with quite a few successful job seekers who credit their new gig to their professional résumé writer. But there are a lot of scammy ones out there, so do some Googling to see whether the person is legit and knows what they're talking about.

Beat the AI bots by customizing your résumé for every single job you apply to.
Companies are increasingly using AI to score candidates based on how well their résumés match the job description. And recruiters often prioritize résumés by filtering them for keywords from the job posting. So make sure you use those exact same words in your résumé, and list achievements that demonstrate you've already done what the company says it's looking for. "If you don't take the extra time to tailor your résumé to the job listing," says Avani Prabhakar, the chief people officer at Atlassian, "you stand no chance."

Use a bot to beat the bots.
Customization is time-consuming, but there are online tools that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Teal, for example, compares your résumé to job listings and suggests new bullet points to make them match up more.

But for God's sake, don't put the keywords in white.
For some reason, the internet has become convinced that you can game applicant tracking systems by sneaking extra keywords onto your résumé in a white font that will be visible only to the software. There's apparently a small chance it might work. But some recruiters actually check for "white fonting," and then reject you as dishonest. If you think a keyword is important, stick to black type.

Be careful with the boss vibes.
Many companies are cutting back on the ranks of middle managers, which has forced a lot of senior-level professionals to apply to lower-level jobs. If that's you, don't emphasize your managerial skills in your résumé — you don't want recruiters to think you're above getting your hands dirty. Instead, says Saba Siddiqui, the head of talent acquisition at Gusto, position yourself as a player-coach. Highlight all the ways you continued to pitch in as an individual contributor, even when you were in a supervisory position.

Don't get your heart set on working from home.
Given the return-to-office push, most companies are advertising only for in-office or hybrid roles. Many recruiters don't even bother to look at candidates who live far away. On your résumé, make sure you specify the city and state where you live at the top. If that's far from a company's offices and you're willing to relocate, indicate that next to your current location.

But if you do apply for a WFH role, emphasize the W.
Tailor your résumé to prove you're good at working remotely. After all, WFH is a skill of its own. "We really look for people who are autonomous, who can manage their time in an efficient way, who feel comfortable working in ambiguity, and don't require people holding their hand," says Anastasia Pshegodskaya, the director of talent acquisition at Remote. "These are the skills you would like to see on the CV." Note the roles you've had that were fully remote, and showcase your experience working with far-flung teams.

Ditch the cover letter.
No one reads it. For companies that require one, send in something generic, but don't spend too much time customizing it. The résumé is the far more important document.

START APPLYING

Get to the front of the line.
Many applicant tracking systems present candidates in the order they applied. Recruiters often don't get through all the candidates. And the companies that actually commit to reviewing every résumé will take down the job listing as soon as they get enough applicants, which can happen within days. So make sure you apply as soon as you can. Pro tip: Set up job alerts for your dream companies on LinkedIn so you get a notification the moment a new listing goes up.

Jump the line.
Unless a company specifically tells you not to, send a DM or email introducing yourself to the hiring manager or recruiter. Worried it might annoy them? "I would take that risk," says Steve Knox, the global head of talent acquisition at Dayforce. "Show that you're taking initiative." Nine times out of 10, Knox says, the manager will be curious enough to click on your LinkedIn profile — and if they like what they see, they'll put you on the fast track. Here's a DM one job seeker sent to a recruiter right after she applied for a position. The recruiter wrote back to set up a call, and the enterprising applicant ended up beating out more than 1,500 other candidates to land the role:

Do everything you can to get a referral.
With a referral, according to Greenhouse's data, you're nine times more likely to get hired than a candidate without one. A referral from someone who knows you well is best. But if you're not close to anyone at your dream companies, circle back to those people you cold-called and ask if they can put you in touch with their colleagues on the team you're hoping to join. And don't be shy about asking whether they'd be open to putting in a word for you with the hiring manager — many companies offer referral bonuses for their employees.

Don't be afraid to apply for a job cold.
Can't find a connection at the company? Give it a shot anyway. In one analysis, Greenhouse found that 68% of the hires made by its clients were external applicants without a referral. Your odds will be insanely long, but it doesn't hurt to try.

Pitch your own job.
Four years ago, when I was looking for a new job, I had a bunch of networking calls with editors at Business Insider. I wasn't right for any of the positions they were advertising for, so I pitched them on the job I really wanted: to write features about the American workplace. They liked the idea enough to create a whole new role for me to do exactly that. Not only did it enable me to land my dream job, but it also afforded me a distinct advantage: I was the only applicant.

Infiltrate your target.
Full-time jobs are hard to come by — so consider getting your foot in the door as a contractor. Use this website to look up which staffing agencies your dream companies use, and then contact those agencies directly. "Since their product is people," says Minton, the recruiter, "they are generally more likely to connect with you." Once you're a contractor at a company, you can network on the inside and work your way up to a full-time position.

ACE YOUR INTERVIEWS

Do your homework.
There was a time when senior professionals could wing their interviews on charisma alone. Not anymore. "Right now there's an expectation that you have done extensive research," says Frank Burgoyne, an interview coach for experienced professionals. "And that goes beyond the company website." Read every news article about the company. Watch as many of its obscure sales presentations on YouTube as you can stand. Be ready to show that you already understand the problems the company is wrestling with and why you're uniquely qualified to solve them.

Apply to some "maybe" jobs before the dream ones.
Think of them as preseason warmups. Says Tague, the career consultant: "You're going to get that interview practice in a safer environment, with lower risk, than your one shot at Google."

Get ChatGPT to help.
Give it the job description, your résumé, and your interviewer's job title, and ask it to spit out a bunch of sample questions for you to answer. You can even have it critique your answers, but don't recite its suggestions verbatim. Recruiters can tell when you're regurgitating canned, robotic answers.

Use the STAR method.
If an interview question starts with "tell me about a time that you," your answer should be structured in four steps: situation, task, action, result. "It used to be a nice-to-have," Burgoyne says. "But now companies expect that 100%." Burgoyne tells his clients not only to prep their answers, but also to keep a running spreadsheet of stories formatted in the STAR method. "You'll have that spreadsheet for the rest of your career," he says. "And you should be adding to it regularly."

Don't answer "What's your biggest weakness?" with "I'm a perfectionist."
It's lame, and recruiters will see right through it. Instead, talk about something that was once a weakness and then explain how you overcame it.

Send a thank-you email after every interview.
And not a generic "thank you so much for the interview yesterday." Mention something specific from the conversation that impressed you, or an additional thought you had about something they asked you. Bonus points if you can tie that back to the contribution you hope to make.

Collect your failures.
Got rejected? Treat it as another networking opportunity. Send your interviewers a request for a LinkedIn connection. And ask the recruiter if you can follow up in a couple of months to see if more jobs have opened up. "I can think of quite a few people that have been hired at Autodesk who did not get the first role that they applied for," says Diani. "They followed up either with that hiring manager or the recruiter, and were put in process for another role."

KEEP YOUR COOL

Stay organized.
It's common for job seekers to keep a spreadsheet of the jobs they've applied to. But even more important is keeping a spreadsheet of all the people you talked to along the way. Include where they work, how you met them, a summary of the conversation you had, and when you spoke. Then follow up with them every few months — and hit them up for a referral when there's a job opening at their company.

Don't take rejections personally.
Datapeople, a provider of recruiting analytics, has found that nearly a third of all job postings never result in a hire. "Hiring happens within the context of a whole big messy company with decisions and priorities and delays and personalities," says Tague, who led recruiting teams at companies like Microsoft and Lyft. "Very rarely are they digging into it like, 'Oh, if only she'd said this.' It's not really like that on the inside. There could be internal people you don't know about. There's all kinds of factors that can come into play, but the candidate doesn't see that." So stop obsessing over the reason you were rejected — it probably had little to do with you. Move on.

Build a support group.
You know how married people don't understand the hell that is modern dating? Employed people don't understand how miserable job searching is these days. Make sure you surround yourself with folks who actually get it. Don't think you're alone, because you aren't.

Take breaks, weekends, vacations.
Job-searching burnout is real. Keep it sustainable by not doing it all the time.

Congrats! You got a job!
But if you're smart, you're not done with the job search. Keep networking at your dream companies. Work the room at industry events. Tague recommends setting a goal to connect with two new people a month. The more legwork you do while you've got a job, the easier it'll be the next time you find yourself looking for one. Here's hoping that's not for a long, long time.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

Over the past two years, American businesses have been engaged in a rapid-fire restructuring of their corporate hierarchies. In the name of "flattening," they've been waging war on middle managers — trimming an entire tier of supervisory jobs that Mark Zuckerberg derided as nothing more than "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." Following Meta's lead, Citi reduced its 13 layers of management to eight. UPS axed 12,000 of its 85,000 managers. And in September, Amazon announced plans to increase its ratio of workers to supervisors by at least 15%. "I hate bureaucracy," CEO Andy Jassy declared, echoing the zeal for "efficiency" that Elon Musk, one of the pioneers of the current corporate flattening, is now seeking to unleash on the halls of government.

But here's the thing: It's not just that tens of thousands of middle managers have lost their jobs. It's that the jobs themselves have been eliminated — and they may not be coming back.

To test that theory, I asked Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics provider, to crunch the numbers for me, using its database of job postings aggregated from across the internet. It divided employees into two buckets of managers (senior leadership and middle management) and two buckets of lower-level employees (experienced associates and junior workers). Then it looked at how many job openings employers are posting today, compared with the hiring heyday of 2022.

What the data reveals is stark. Earlier this year, when white-collar hiring was at its lowest point, openings for junior roles — entry-level positions requiring little to no prior experience — were down by 14%. But hiring had plunged by 43% for middle managers and 57% for senior leaders. If you had any sort of management experience, your job prospects were bleak.

Since then, though, we've seen a significant rebound in job postings for almost everyone — except middle managers. In October, employers were still advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022. Which means that those who lost their jobs in the Great Flattening are now facing a whole new horror: There aren't any positions left for them to take.

The assault on middle managers dates back to the 1980s, when globalization gave rise to a new philosophy of management that prioritized cost cutting over everything else. Supervisors — earning big salaries for rubber-stamping the work of their subordinates — became an easy target. Trim the fat, the thinking went, and the efficiencies will follow. From 1986 to 1998, one study found, the number of managers reporting to division heads dropped by 25%. At the same time, the number of managers reporting directly to a CEO nearly doubled.

Executives got the flattening that they wanted. But it's unclear whether getting rid of middle managers actually made companies run more efficiently. As I wrote last year, one study found that businesses with fewer layers of management were able to deliver their products faster. But study after study found that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running.

But now is an especially bad time to be an experienced supervisor. According to an analysis by Live Data Technologies, another workforce analytics provider, middle managers made up 32% of layoffs last year, compared with 20% in 2019. And as the data from Revelio Labs shows, companies appear to have no intention of refilling those supervisory roles, even as they resume hiring for lower-level jobs. That has created a double whammy for middle managers: There's a sharp spike in job seekers, and they're competing for an increasingly small universe of open roles.

Over the past year I've heard from hundreds of managers mired in this double whammy. What's struck me is how eerily similar their stories are. They all come across as smart and articulate. They're all in their late 40s to 50s. When they got laid off from their supervisory jobs, they didn't expect their job search to be too difficult. After all, they'd spent decades honing their skills and climbing the corporate ladder, often at leading companies. Surely, all that experience had to count for something. But despite sending out hundreds of applications, they can't get anyone to return their calls. They're utterly baffled, and they all have the same question: What is going on here?

It's the question I've been asking, too — combing through government data, talking to employers and economists, studying applicant-tracking systems. Because so many of the frustrated job seekers are older, I thought maybe we were seeing some new form of age discrimination: Call it the Curse of the Gen X Professional. But it's only after seeing the data from Revelio Labs that I finally understand what's going on: There just aren't enough supervisory jobs to go around anymore.

In response, many displaced managers have swallowed their pride and started applying to jobs lower on the corporate food chain. As Revelio Labs' data shows, nonmanagerial jobs are faring much better these days — and you'd think companies would be thrilled to get the experience and know-how of seasoned professionals on the cheap. But take the example of a former middle manager I'll call Rick, who is 54. After getting rejected for all the supervisory jobs he could find, he widened his search to include entry-level positions — only to be rejected for being overqualified.

At this point, all Rick wants is a chance to prove himself. "Forget the titles, forget all that other stuff," he told me. "I just need a job. My unemployment runs out in about 30 days. I'll come in and do a great job for you."

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of the Great Flattening: The very experience that should be a selling point for senior leaders has become a liability. Some have tried deleting former jobs from their resumes, to hide their supervisory experience. Others, like Rick, omit the year they graduated from college. One former chief operating officer, whose search has gone so poorly that she's now applying to be an executive assistant, told me she addresses her overqualified-ness in her cover letters. "I understand that my résumé has some big titles on it, but let me tell you who I am at heart," she writes. "I really want to be doing this, and I'm not wedded to the title."

What all the out-of-work managers want to know is: When is the hiring freeze for supervisors going to thaw? That depends, in large part, on whether companies come to view the flattening as a success. Many CEOs insist they aren't getting rid of middle managers just to save money. They think having fewer layers of management will, as Zuckerberg put it, create a "stronger" company that can build "higher-quality products faster." That hints at a dark prospect for managers like Rick: The rung of the corporate ladder they spent their careers reaching could be gone for good.

There's a chance, of course, that the current craze for corporate flattening could ease over time. Companies are already discovering that having few middle managers is placing an enormous strain on their operations. The supervisors who survived the purge have been forced to take on much larger teams, and they're burned out to a crisp. Gen Zers, deprived of their mentors, are increasingly disengaged. Departments are more siloed than ever, with no one to do the tedious and thankless and essential work of coordinating across different teams. The best hope for managers like Rick is that CEOs are getting a real-time refresher in the value of managers.

"I'm not at that point in my life where I'm ready to take that step back," Rick told me. "I just want to work with good people and enjoy what I'm doing. I could go to Domino's and start delivering pizza. But I know I can do a lot more than that."

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.