Snapshots of the economy: Relentless inflation and a stagnant job market have thrust the economy to the forefront of the November midterms. In the run-up to election day, USA TODAY Money reporters fanned out across the country to examine how Americans are coping with the financial squeeze, from the gut-punch of sudden layoffs and endless job searches to the daily grind of making ends meet. This is the first piece in a six-part series.
In her Arlington, Virginia, apartment, Lissette Ramos’s only company is two foster cats curled up beside her. Their food and veterinary bills are covered by a local rescue group – a small mercy for the 31-year-old as she creeps closer to the financial edge.
She brought Charlotte and Sweet home the day before losing
her first corporate role in a sudden wave of layoffs at mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
Gone is the daily office commute. Now, after tending to her cats in the morning, Ramos heads straight to her desk to check the daily job alerts. She spends four to eight hours scouring sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and HiringCafe, customizing her resume for positions that fit her qualifications. At 5 p.m., she feeds her cats, goes for a walk to get in her 10,000 steps and returns home to lift weights before settling in for the evening.
Yet one year and hundreds of applications later, she is still stuck in a job search catch-22 – overqualified for entry-level work yet sidelined for junior and mid-level roles.
The situation is a frustrating setback for Ramos. Independent from an early age, she worked her way through community college and vocational programs before earning an information science degree from the University of Michigan in 2023. Relocating to Virginia for a hybrid data and project role at Freddie Mac was a sign that her persistence had finally paid off.
Instead, after burning through six weeks of severance and her savings, she is in a daily fight for survival, drawing down her modest retirement account to keep afloat. For months, she relied on credit cards to buy groceries, carrying the debt while paying only the minimum. While she qualifies for government food assistance and recently landed a gig as a substitute teacher, the meager income barely covers the essentials as she continues her search for a corporate role.
"Financially, I am really shaky right now," she said. "I just wish I could figure out what I have to do."
Ramos’s ordeal is far from an isolated case. Across the country, job seekers are confronting a harsh reality: A layoff is no longer the temporary setback it used to be.
Despite the deceptively low 4.2% unemployment rate, the hiring landscape is increasingly unforgiving. While sectors like health care and skilled trades face labor shortages, job openings across many other sectors are harder to come by.
High interest rates and economic uncertainty have prompted businesses nationwide to scale back expansion plans and slow hiring, labor market experts say. The shift has created a surprisingly sluggish job market as employers cling to current staff and squeeze more work out of the existing workforce while turning to artificial intelligence to pick up the slack.
With job seekers competing for a shrinking pool of openings, searches that once took weeks now stretch into months or even years. The average duration of unemployment has climbed past five months, with long-term unemployment rising. More than 27% of job seekers were looking for 27 weeks or longer without landing a role.
Even when a candidate catches an employer's eye, the hiring process often moves at a crawl. Data provided to USA TODAY by recruiting platform Greenhouse shows the average time to fill an open role has climbed steadily in recent years, from 41.4 days in 2022 to 61.5 days in the first eight months of 2026.
"I have been looking since the day I was laid off," said Ramos, who is willing to uproot her life once more if it means securing a job. “I am in a hard place right now.”
‘A shock to the system’
An unexpected job loss shatters more than financial security. It triggers a broader crisis. For many, a career isn’t just a paycheck – it’s the anchor for professional identity, social connections and daily routine.
What follows is a grieving process, with job seekers cycling from shock, anger and depression to eventual acceptance – a trajectory that almost always begins with a spike of adrenaline.
Signing the lease on a Houston apartment in March was supposed to be a fresh start for Briana Grace and her three-year-old daughter. Instead, before they could even move in, the 31-year-old payroll specialist was laid off from the company she had called home for four years.
Having worked continuously since age 15, Grace threw herself into the job search. But within days, her initial momentum crashed into a wall.
Her experience is part of a growing trend. New technology has made applying for a job easier than ever, flooding recruiters with resumes and creating massive bottlenecks. What's more, these AI hiring screeners can filter out and reject candidates so employers often don't see their application.
Rutgers public policy professor Carl Van Horn, who has studied unemployment trends for 40 years, frequently hears from applicants who submit hundreds of resumes without a single human reply. Omit the right keywords and "they’ve put their resume into the abyss," he said.
What many find even more jarring is the complete lack of support beyond a temporary unemployment check right when they are struggling to regain their footing.
“When people lose their job, they are not only losing income and relationships, a sense of well-being and meaningfulness, they're also out there without a net,” Van Horn said. “They are on their own.”
The financial strain – losing income, benefits, retirement contributions – is heavy enough on its own. But it is often compounded by something deeper: wounded self-confidence and the persistent fear of being judged – not just by prospective employers, but by a spouse or partner, relatives or close friends.
"Getting laid off is pretty much always a shock to the system," said Frances McKee-Ryan, a management professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Depression and anxiety spike while overall life satisfaction plummets. Physical health often suffers, too, though just how much is often a matter of where people are in their careers.
Joblessness in early adulthood can disrupt identity formation and permanently depress lifetime earnings, McKee-Ryan said. Mid-career workers face peak financial demands – mortgages, family, tuition – just as corporate cuts hit middle management. For older professionals, widespread age discrimination creates another barrier, with two-thirds of workers 50 and older encountering or witnessing age bias, according to AARP's Carly Roszkowski.
Across every age group, the hiring landscape has become a moving target as traditional job paths vanish faster than applicants can adapt.
"It feels like shifting sand in terms of what the job market is going to look like going forward," McKee-Ryan said. "So that’s another multiplier of the stress."
‘People openly talk about hitting rock bottom’
If the initial weeks run on adrenaline, the rest of the year settles into a soul-crushing routine. Searching for work becomes a full-time job in itself – a relentless grind of trying to get noticed by hiring teams.
Job seekers endure round after grueling round of interviews, only to be ghosted without a word while employers stack unrealistic demands onto single roles once handled by entire teams, labor market experts say. All the while, months of unemployment drain severance checks and cash reserves.
For Grace, the financial cushion vanished in just two months. Unease turned to dread as she tried to stretch unemployment benefits that paid half her former paycheck, spending her days negotiating payment plans with creditors.
"The hard part is staying faithful and hopeful and just keeping it going," Grace said. "Because I had my days where I was just like, 'Man, I really don't know how I'm gonna pay this or be able to afford that.'"
One of the first casualties of a brutal job market is what Georgia State management professor Songqi Liu calls "job search self-efficacy" – a candidate's belief in their own ability to land a role.
"Anxious, desperate people don't necessarily search harder," he said. "Without confidence, anxiety tends to produce avoidance instead of effort.”
The crush of rejections only deepens the crisis by cutting off the small wins candidates need to feel capable again. Without callbacks, interview invites or recruiter feedback, confidence quickly evaporates, according to Liu.
Fresh off a wedding she planned before losing her job, Melissa Caudill, a 47-year-old operations professional from Kentucky, spent what should have been her honeymoon tweaking resumes, scanning job boards and submitting applications. She calls it "the glamorous life of an unemployed newlywed."
Since her layoff in June, she has sent out dozens of applications without securing a single interview. In today’s flooded job market, standing out feels nearly impossible, she said.
After four layoffs since 2010 – the most recent before this last one was just three years ago – Caudill sees a labor market that hasn't just slowed down but broken down.
“The job market was tough then but, from my experience, it’s definitely worse now,” she said. “I’m competing against what feels like an enormous pool of people for every remote opening.”
For rural workers like Caudill, the hurdles are even higher. Remote roles are a lifeline, yet these hyper-competitive positions routinely filter out applicants lacking high-speed, hard-wired internet.
Distressed by a wave of desperation on LinkedIn, where job seekers face eviction or skip essential medications, Caudill launched JustGotLaidOff.org to connect job seekers with resources and support. Within days, the site drew hundreds of visitors.
“You’re supposed to treat finding a job like a full-time job, except you’re doing it while worrying about money, health insurance and how long you can keep everything afloat,” she said. “I’ve seen people openly talk about hitting rock bottom."
'I don't know what else to do'
Past the 12-month mark, a job search stops being a test of endurance and becomes a constant exercise in explaining the long gap on your resume.
Churece Thompson spent two decades in constant demand as an executive assistant, expanding her scope into operations and marketing while weathering both the 2008 financial crash and the pandemic unscathed.
In her last role, she spearheaded her firm’s New York office relocation all while completing her degree. When corporate restructuring eliminated her position in September 2024, she said her handoff required a 10-page memo just to cover her daily duties.
Yet after more than two years and 500 applications, that track record has yielded almost no traction. Her lone interview process ended after four rounds when the company hired another finalist – and forgot to tell her.
Far more typical are the automated rejections citing "careful consideration" or dismissive recruiter interactions like a recent three-minute phone screening with an off-camera interviewer who promised an answer in 24 to 48 hours, only to send a rejection in less than three.
The financial toll has forced painful compromises. Thompson and her husband are relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina, to lower their living expenses and to be closer to family. Tight finances have kept her from traveling to meet her 1-year-old niece, leaving her to watch the child grow up strictly in photos and video calls.
A 2026 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Liu and colleagues found that continuous job-search setbacks force candidates to lower their target salaries. In a market dominated by rejections and scarce offers, that downward spiral leads not just to lower-paying jobs but to lower lifetime earning potential, Liu said.
"I don't know what else to do," Thompson said. "At this point, should I get a job at Target? Would they even hire me?"
For Jennifer Smith, a 47-year-old single mother of three laid off in September 2024 after 26 years at a Tampa, Florida, financial services firm, it has been one hard choice after another.
Right as she lost her job, she received a devastating diagnosis: cancer. To keep her health insurance intact when she needed it most, Smith charged her premiums and out-of-pocket costs for two major surgeries and subsequent treatments to her credit cards.
"I need a job to save my life – quite literally," Smith said.
Despite a decades-long track record leading major product management and development projects, she remains unemployed. Out of roughly 2,000 applications submitted, she has landed just 10 interviews. Whether she completes one round or five, the process always ends in silence.
Now, with her savings and retirement accounts wiped out and no eligibility for government aid, Smith has lost her health coverage. To cope, she has begun delaying critical medical appointments, specialist visits, oncology follow-ups and diagnostic testing.
Unable to afford her basic medications, she recently put her family home on the market to protect what little financial stability she has left.
Where will she go if it sells? "Honestly," Smith said, "I have no idea yet."
'Some people aren't as lucky as me'
Sustained by her faith in God and herself, Grace finally reached a turning point in September when a consulting firm contacted her about a remote payroll position.
A swift hiring process culminated in a brief, seven-minute call offering her the job. The moment left her temporarily speechless. Five months and more than 100 applications later, she had landed the perfect job.
The new job brought Grace much-needed relief but also a haunting awareness of just how fragile financial stability really is and how many other capable people are still out there hoping for their next big break.
"I know how scary that can be not knowing where your next meal is going to come from or if you can afford a bill or your rent,” she said. “Some people aren't as lucky as me to be able to eventually find work."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'I need a job to save my life': Inside the desperate hunt for work in America
