I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that people who have lost their jobs in the past year or so are choosing not to look for new ones. They still need jobs. They still need the income. Opting out of the job search process is not out of luxury or privilege.
Instead, I believe they’re rejecting the traditional job search process before the job search can reject them.
At first I thought I was watching a handful of outliers cope in their own weird way.
Then I started asking around.
Then I started doing the math from my own two job searches in six years.
And now I don’t think this is a coping mechanism at all. I think it’s a rational response to a broken system with abysmal return on investment.
Start with the basic math of applying for a job right now: the average response rate across a job application sits around 2 to 3%, meaning something like 97 or 98 out of every 100 applications end in ghosting or auto-rejection. And that’s the good scenario, before you account for the listings that were never real to begin with.
Because a real chunk of what you’re applying to isn’t real. Depending on whose count you trust, somewhere between roughly one in seven and one in five job postings right now is a ghost job (a listing kept alive to build a talent pipeline, satisfy an HR policy, or make a company look like it’s growing, with zero real intent to hire). TL;DR: the gap between “jobs listed” and “jobs actually filled” has never been wider.
Meanwhile, the mass layoffs feeding people into this broken funnel aren’t slowing down. 2025 saw over 1.2 million layoffs in the U.S. alone, 58% more than2024 and the highest total since the 2020 shutdowns.
And most telling: the percentage of workers who said they planned to job search dropped from 93% last year to just 43% this year.
Yes, applying online was always a numbers game. But the numbers used to make sense: you applied, a person read it, you got a callback some percentage of the time. What’s happened instead is that application volume exploded (anyone can apply to anything in two clicks now) while hiring intent fizzled out (a growing share of what you’re applying to was never going anywhere).
Importantly, a referral can still improve your odds by 10 to 20x, which tells you everything about where the real hiring is actually happening: in someone’s DMs, not in the “apply now” button.
Anecdotally, I was laid off from a “dream” tech job in 2024 after less than a year in the role. I was still shaking off the trauma of the first job search process just 8 months prior when I dove right back in, head first, applying to an average of 10 jobs per day online.
I expanded the types of roles I was looking for, casting a very wide net into HR, comms, coaching, higher ed, and even ghostwriting. And I was ghosted or rejected from even the roles where I actually had a real shot– where a mentor’s brother-in-law was the hiring manager, or someone texted my resume directly to a decision-maker. I’d had the inside track and I still got nowhere.
Which told me something I didn’t want to hear yet: this might be a losing game.
I know personally that opting out of the traditional job search feels like admitting that you’re a failure, not like a smart strategy.
We are handed exactly one script for what to do after a layoff, and it’s “look for another job, the same way you looked for the last one, just faster.”
So when that script stops producing results, the instinct isn’t to question the script, it’s to assume you’re doing it wrong. You hire a resume writer, you stalk another job board, you talk yourself into applying for roles that you don’t even want to do.
But as long as you cling to the sunk-cost fallacy of traditional job searching (“I’ve already invested all this time, money, and energy into this process, changing course now would be a waste,”), months, if not years, of your income, identity, and sense of forward motion sit in someone else’s inbox, unanswered.
Nobody taught us what to do when the rules themselves are the problem. We’re fluent in “work harder within the system” and functionally illiterate in “the system doesn’t want what you’re selling, so sell something else.”
For me, “selling something else” meant:
Pivoting to applying for part-time and fractional roles through Generalist World, Fractional Jobs, and Moxie (all of which moved faster than a single traditional application ever did)
Pitching executive coaching and workshops directly to companies instead of applying to their open reqs
Doubling down on brand partnerships and 1:1 coaching, where I could control the terms
Almost two years later, I’m still in the part-time role I landed through that process, with zero interest in going back to full-time, because the stack of income streams I built compounds in a way one salary never did.
And I’m not alone in this. I’m hearing the same story from a growing number of friends and connections: “They took me on part-time,” “the project proposal got more traction than my resume ever did,” “I stopped applying and started pitching.”
Freelancers now make up close to half the U.S. workforce, and more than half of Gen Z job seekers globally say they’ve shifted their focus away from full-time roles entirely. I see that as a real redistribution of where people are putting their effort, because the traditional funnel stopped being where the effort paid off.
Maybe the opt-out isn’t permanent for everyone. Maybe it’s a seasonal strategy. But I think it’s worth calling out: choosing not to keep feeding a system with a 2-3% return rate is a rational decision.
If you’ve considered pausing your job application efforts and building something else instead — pitching, freelancing, going part-time, stacking a few smaller income streams — I don’t think you owe anyone an explanation for that.
Are you opting out too? Or are you still in it, playing the traditional game by traditional rules? I want to know where you land– tell me in the comments.
-Janel
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